Written in Dec '83 MDB." To the best of my knowledge, MDB is Mike Boich, an early Macintosh software evangelist who also wrote MacTerminal.
Mac diskkeeper code#
Comments in the code state, "This is the unofficial Mac ramdisk driver.
It was later distributed in the Macintosh Software Supplement, on a 3.5" floppy for Lisa Workshop. The first-ever RAM disk for Macintosh was not surprisingly written internally at Apple in December 1983. This configuration, of keeping the System files in a RAM disk, will allow the maximum of disk space to be available on your floppies, and should reduce the need to swap disks while you work. Now if you have two floppy drives, you can use one disk with applications on it (but no System or Finder) and another disk with your documents on it. Switch-launch to this Finder by double-clicking its icon while holding Command-Option. command to periodically save the document to the RAM disk, then to the floppy disk.Ī good technique for a RAM disk is to put the System, Finder, and Imagewriter printer files on the RAM disk. One compromise is to load your application on the RAM disk, then save your work to a floppy disk. Early Macs are fairly stable, but they're still prone to crashing, so it's not a good idea to risk storing your only copy of a document on a RAM disk. The downside to this increased speed is volatility: once the power goes out, the contents of RAM, and hence your RAM disk, are lost for good. Because RAM is extremely fast to access, as there's no spinning disk, loading applications and saving documents happens in just fractions of a second. A RAM disk can be formatted for MFS or HFS.
Mac diskkeeper driver#
A special disk driver reads and writes data in RAM instead of on a floppy or hard disk. The simplest explanation of a RAM disk is that it is a block of memory in the Mac that is reserved and arranged to work like a floppy disk. The applications take time to start up, the disk seems to be the bottle neck, I presume that more memory would solve this problem, I wonder if I wouldn't rather have the second drive be ram disk." Having these in RAM reduced the need to access the floppy disk.īut beyond the benefit to applications was the potential for a RAM disk, a block of memory set aside to work as a lightning-fast disk, albeit one whose contents were ever at risk of being scattered to the wind if the Mac crashed or lost power.Īs Ben Hyde, who had had his Macintosh for about a month, mused in March 1984, "The most frustrating thing about the mac is speed. Now the next question was what do do with all that RAM? Thanks to the design of the Macintosh Memory Manager, applications automatically benefited from the larger heap size the Resource Manager could keep more resources in memory too, such as code segments, strings, and icons. Outside of Apple, everyone in the know knew that the 512K Mac was right around the corner the question was when would 256-kilobit DRAM prices drop enough to make the Fat Mac affordable? According to source code comments, prototype Macintosh units with 512K of RAM existed at Apple Computer in May 1983.
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