Raymond Ingles wrote: > On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:37 AM, Scott Holder <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Note that on the off chance you're using something that requires 24 bit >> addressing, you'll have to switch it back and lose the extra RAM. >> > > Yeah, some older programs would 'hide' information in the upper bits > of the address, since the system didn't use those bits, and "Who would > ever have more than 8MB RAM anyway?" Those programs fail badly on > systems that *do* use those bits, of course. (Even Apple was slightly > guilty of this, since some of their ROM code wasn't "32-bit clean". > Fortunately, there's the "Mode32" system enabler to work around that.) > > As I recall, it was mostly some games that had that trouble... but > wasn't some version of Word or another guilty, too? >
From some of my readings of histories, the early Microsoft apps were among the worst offenders in using undocumented tricks and such to run. IIRC, they actually ran in an intepreted environment of sorts rather than directly on the bare metal, and were among the most arcane apps running at the time. When the Switcher app, and then later Multifinder were made, a lot of specific workarounds had to be done for the various MS apps to keep them running smoothly. It's interesting reading through some of the historical stuff at http://www.folklore.org . A lot of the original OS and ROM design was very very limiting by later standards - a lot of assumptions were made about the low-level hardware that crippled Mac OS all the way through Mac OS 9, but made a lot of sense at the time since they had 64k of ROM and 128k of RAM to work with. There were a lot of badly-behaved apps though, so it's not entirely fair to single out Microsoft. I think the Mac platform suffered from the same malady that is, to some extent, still affecting the x86 platform - no one imagined the same basic architecture would last as long as it did. People didn't foresee a business buying into a software platform and then expecting it to run for 20 years. Scott --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
