Re: Apple II SCSI cards

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Bart <who@where.what> wrote:

> David Empson wrote:
> >About its only unique feature is Apple's "Pascal ProFile Manager", which
> >allows the sharing of the drive between ProDOS and Pascal, with the
> >ability to create multiple logical Pascal volumes.
> 
> Anyone know of a copy of this hanging around? or is this built into the
> firmware and I just don't know it?

It was a commercial product sold by Apple.

My recollection is that it was around the time of Pascal 1.1, and worked
like a combination of a driver and application, mapping logical volumes
within the Pascal area to higher unit numbers.  The user interface part
of it lets you do Filer-like operations on the logical volumes, e.g.
create and delete volumes, crunch free space (between volumes), and
mount and unmount volumes.

It doesn't let you boot Pascal from the ProFILE - you have to boot from
another device (5.25" floppy being the only option for Pascal 1.2 and
earlier, unless you extensively patch the startup code).

The ProFILE can also be used for ProDOS (and is bootable in ProDOS) -
the Pascal area looks like a large file with storage type 4 located at
the end of the ProDOS volume.  One of the ProDOS technical notes
describes the internal structure of the Pascal area.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz