Re: Apple Drops Backward Compatibility for Next MacOS

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article fozzie@macatawa.org (Adam Devereaux ) writes...

>> In article <28OCT199612481191@vax2.concordia.ca>,
>> Mitchell Spector <spec@vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>> >    True, I remember that all too well (I recall paying several hundred
>> >dollars just to add 768K to my Apple IIgs Memory Expansion Card in 1988).
>> >Still, why was it the Macintosh II, SE and Plus continued to ship with 1MB 
>> >RAM as standard in 1988, while the Apple IIgs shipped with only 256K? It
>> >was no less expensive to supply those machines with that amount of RAM.
>> >As well, the II and SE had support for internal hardrives which you had
>> >the option of buying, why didn't Apple do the same for the Apple IIgs?
> 
>Wait a minute! IIgs only shiped with 256k for the first little while, with
>rom 00 wasn't it?

    The Apple IIgs shipped with 256K from it's release, on September 15th,
1986, until sometime in mid-1988. The 'ROM 00' and 'ROM 01' were identical 
in terms of the motherboard, the only difference was a newer ROM firmware 
was swapped in. In otherwords, both had 256K of DRAMs soldered in place
(not counting the 64K dedicated to the Ensoniq chip). 

>Then they put in a card that had 512k on it, but could hold up to 1meg..
>which would bring you to 1.25meg.

    Yes, Apple started to bundle 'Apple IIgs Memory Expansion Cards' at
no extra change with ROM 01 CPU's. Previously, they were available as an
option which you had to pay for separately (as I did back in late January
of 1988, as my IIgs did not include one). This was mid-1988, so GS's were
shipping with 512K at this time, but only by means of the card (with 256K
soldered on) being per-installed. The motherboard had not changed and you
still had to populate the three empty banks (256K x 3) yourself, to bring
the card up to 1MB of RAM. This slight bit of extra memory came less than 
a year before the release of the 1MB ROM version 3, it was _not_ shortly
after the GS's release.

>Which the ROM 03 sold with anyways..

    The extra memory came soldered-in on the motherboard at that time,
there was the same 128K of 'Standard RAM' (or "Slow RAM") but the area
of 'Fast RAM' was increased eight times, up to 1024K. So by August 1989,
the IIgs was shipping with 1.125MB of RAM. Yet this should have come
from the start, not just before the end of the decade! 

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca