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Looper's Delight
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In 1986 I was doing support-development at a software company
and was asked to work with some folks on software destined for the Mac,
evaluating products proposed to the firm for further/ultimate development etc
(in this case the ill-fated dBASE Mac was chosen over a more robust and
functional dBASE environment). For a few months we had to assimilate
characteristics of the hardware-software-firmware running on the "little
toaster", in order to anticipate possible development problems etc.
The fellow writing the memory/disk allocation routines was
having the worst time of all, despite having come from a 64000
environment. One night I dropped by to drag him out to eat dinner, and he
said he'd figured out why the memory-disk pre-allocation was such a problem on
the Mac. He cleared off one of his desk areas and grabbed a bunch of 720k
1.44" diskettes, and said, "This is how the Mac manages free memory and disk
space...", beginning a monologue on the part of the machine, "Hm, prefetch...
HERE", tossing a disk on the tabletop, "and here", another disk, tossed
someplace randomly, "and here's the database loaded," another disk randomly
tossed... and so on, until around 10 diskettes laid on the table, none
overlapping, but with lots of free tabletop (free ram) between each. And
we thought that having a whopping 5MB hard drive would help!
It would appear that not much has changed in this regard on
the Mac. Or has it?
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