Re: IIGS ram card work in ][e?

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

In article <3676A345.3F42@sonic.net>, pgrammen@sonic.net writes...

>Mitchell Spector wrote:
> 
>>     What you can do however, is pull the chips from the IIgs board
>> and install them on an Apple II "Slinky" card or RamWorks type of
>> board (both use the same 256 Kilobit chips).
> 
>I've seen mention of these Slinky boards- how are they identified? (I'm
>new to Apples, though I'm very knowledgeable on IBM and fairly
>knowledgeable on Macs).

    Well they're standard 50-pin Apple II slot cards, which means
they can be inserted and used inside any Apple II with slots (the
II+, IIe, IIgs, as well as compatibles and clones). They're called
"Slinky" due to the way they address memory, reading one byte at
a time, in a sequential order. I believe Apple used the analogy of 
slinky toy climbing down stairs--it takes one stair at a time and
and continuiously follows this pattern.

    Apple's card is simply called "Apple II Memory Expansion Card"
and supports up to 1 MB, and later a version that plugged only in
the memory expandable IIc and IIc Plus was introduced. Applied 
Engineering made a compatible called the RamFactor for slotted
Apple II's, as well as the PC Transporter.

    Cards that plug into the 50-pin auxiliary slot on the IIe are
referred to as bank-switching cards. They work with memory in 64K
chunks at a time, but not as efficent as Slinky memory. Slinky RAM 
cards also are easier to use as RAM Disk devices (Apple's card 
even auto-formats itself as one when you power on).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca