Re: ROM Card question

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3c891a4e_3@news.onlynews.com>,
Bryan Villados <news002@macgeek.org> wrote:
 
> There were two ROM cards. The Applesoft BASIC ROM card was for Apple IIs
> with Integer BASIC. The Integer BASIC ROM card was for Apple II+ that has
> Applesoft BASIC.
> 
> What I don't understand is exactly what's the thought pattern of these
> products were... Why would someone buy a ROM card when they can easily buy a
> 16K RAM card (Language Card what Apple called it) and load the BASIC you
> want to it.
 
Two reasons:
 
1. The ROM card was available before the Language Card.  So if you
wanted both BASIC's before the Language Card was available, the ROM
card was the only way to go.
 
2. Even after Apple's Language Card was available, there was still
a reason to buy the ROM card instead: since the Language Card initially
was sold only with the Apple Pascal system, it was quite expensive;
a ROM card was only approx. 1/3 the price of a Language Card with
Apple Pascal.
 
Later, when other 16K RAM cards became available from third-party
sources, cards you could buy without having to buy Apple Pascal at
the same time, and cards with did cost about as much as a ROM card
from Apple, the reasons for buying a ROM card vanished.
 
> And with a 16K RAM card, you could use it for other things
> besides BASIC. With a ROM card, you would either be stuck with
> the RAM that came with the logic board, or you would have to use
> yet another slot and buy a RAM card that can live in slots other
> than 0. The only advantage I can see in a ROM card is loading of
> BASIC (DOS 3.3 takes several seconds to load BASIC into the
> Language Card).
 
There were speedups of file reads in DOS 3.3 easily available, which
greatly speeded up the loading of any file, including BASIC into the
language card: with such a DOS 3.3 speed up, it took only some 1-2
seconds to load BASIC.
 
Also: how long does it take to boot a contemporary Windoze machine? :-)
 
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se
WWW:     http://hem.passagen.se/pausch/index.html
         http://home.tiscali.se/~pausch/