On 8/6/2015 9:17 AM, Charles Geilfuss wrote:
I'm not sure if it was intentional (to create more business) or an
unintended side effect of their seamless design philosophy. In Steven Job's
biography it clearly states that Jobs commanded that it be difficult to
gain access to the inner workings of the early Apple computers; he wanted
no owners mucking with the insides.
Perhaps you mean middle or late-middle period? Starting with the Mac? The II+ was easily user accessible, with pull off
top and highly accessible innards. Just as well, considering the primitive state of hardware and firmware. Lots of third
party add-ons, alternatives, etc.
There was, for example, no hardware way to indicate how much memory was installed.* So on boot, the OS had to
sequentially write-read up through memory, then settle on the next smallest block with no errors. So a machine with 64k
and a bad chip could be in effect, 16k, with no error or message for the user; only that software didn't work properly.
That was how I got one cheap, then fixed it by sequentially replacing dip chips with a new good piece of memory in the
block above what the OS saw.
Definitely NOT a machine to have difficult to access innards.
Memories of Memory Moose
* On early PCs, one set dip switches to tell the OS how much memory was installed. It, or programs, could then report an
error if that's not what it found available.
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What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?
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