Re: Apple IIGS and RAM Disk

["Roger Johnstone" <bhmhome@es.co.nz>]

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In article <19991129012839.19328.00001302@ng-cm1.aol.com>,
supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:


>Frank Carney <frankc@cyberhighway.net> wrote:
>
>>Is it possible to setup a non volatile ram disk using battery backed
>>static ram?
>
>Sort of.  The RamKeeper from Applied Engineering lets you
>pack up to 16MB of memory using two 8MB RAM cards.
>These are plain old IIGS memory cards, not static RAM.
>One of these 8MB can be used as a ROMdisk, a battery
>backed RAMdisk.
>
>The RamKeeper comes with a battery and an AC power
>supply.  The battery provides a couple of hours of insurance
>against power outage.

There were at least two battery-backed static RAM cards available for the
Apple II. The Thot Speedisk and the Cirtech PlusDISK, there may have been
others. These two cards had up to 1MB of static CMOS RAM on the card. This
memory is much more expensive than dynamic RAM but a small rechargeable
battery mounted on the card would keep the memory contents for months! The
Cirtech card could be used either as a bootable hard disk (battery backed
RAM disk) or as regular RAM.

The original price? According to Apple User in 1988 a PlusDISK cost £147.20
(UK pounds) for 128KB, £18.40 per 64KB expansion kit (the "kit" presumably
consisted of one chip). To go past 512KB required the PlusDISK adaptor, a
piggy-back card, at £107.20 with 64KB fitted. Price for a card with 1MB
already fitted was £487.60! (That's about US$780 for 1MB of storage)


Roger Johnstone
Invercargill
New Zealand
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The three most dangerous things are a programmer with a soldering iron, a
manager who codes, and a user who gets ideas.