Mousehole Report

By Rusty Hodge , Mousehole BBS

Finally Aboard!

JIM FITZSIMMONS

After attending two Mousehole pizza parties and meeting numerous Mouseholers from all over the USA...I have finally figured out how to log on this infamous board thanks to a step by step from Rusty (Thanks Ruusty I have a SHATTER comic book for you). Sooo, greetings one and all. I'm delighted to be a member of this exclusive gathering of wizards and heavy users not to to mention all you hackers. P.S. Still learning to type & Spell.

New Prices

MIKE STEINER

New Prices and stuff. 1) The 128K Macintosh is dead. Apple removed it from the price list and told dealers to upgrade any 128K's left in stock. 2) The 512K Macintosh is now $2499. That is just 4 bucks more than a 128K cost when it first came out. 3) There is a new Imagewriter driver for the Imagewriter II (It will also work with the Imagewriter I). There is a new Font/DA mover that fixes the bugs in the first one when working with a 128K Mac. 4) Through the Looking Glass is now free. Apple is not charging dealers for it and recommends no charge to the customer. 5) Hyper 20K is now $2195 and the Hyper 10K is $1695 (or $1595; I forget which).

Mass Storage Technology

TOOTHY MACS

Those of you hardware techies who stay up with new developments-- what do you think? The following is from a (not new) July 22 EE Times: "Eastman Kodak Co.'s Verbatim Division...is poised to become the first supplier of erasable optical-disk drives for OEMs. "...Verbatim demonstrated a working protottype of a 44-Mbyte optical drive that uses removable 3 1/2 inch media."

The company says OEMs will pay less than $300 for the system. It will be offered at the end of 1986 in various capacities, ranging to well over 100 Mbytes. Media prices should be about $35 for a removable 3 1/2 inch disk. "....featuring a 5-Mbyte-per-second speed...the laser and biasing magnetic head prerecords an entire track as digital ones. The laswer then is turned on and off at a 5-Mbyte per second rate, simply erasing these data bits to form zeroes wherever needed. Such a burst mode can record and read data at fater burst speeds than the track-sector system. "Bate is optimistic that 3rd party standard interfaces will be available by the time the drives are shipped, easing their flow into the Winchester market. "'We're going to be at every significant conference to give people an update on this drive,' said Bate, 'It's a living, breathing reality.'"

So here's the question: Why isn't news of this thing filtering down? I read LOTS of trade mags: and the talk is always about CD ROM and WORM. If we're not careful we're likely to have to live thru a whole generation of ROM stuff just because that's what Sony et al are geared to produce for us, when there's 100 MByte, 5 MegaByte/sec read/write/erase technology that's so cheeeep it can be sold at $300 a crack. Input, anybody?

CD ROM

CHIEF WIZARD

In my opinion, CD ROM is being VERY overrated. First of all, when you stop to think how many units a company has to sell to make a profit after they've entered ALL that data and masked a CD ROM, it's outrages. The actual ROM reader hardware is easy; it's very similar to your barnd new CD player at home. But people have not thought out the problems of the media. How many large databases do you know of that DON'T EVER CHANGE? There's talk of putting dictionaries and encyclopedias on CD ROM. Every dictionary and encyclopedia that I know of has a new edition or at least updates every year. After two or three years, can you see someone searching the main ROM, then searching 3 addendums? I can't think of ONE large, electronic database that doesn't get updated at least once a month. I really don't think people will have a use for nonalterable mass storage devices or media. As soon as a single producer comes out with a system that can do the same amount of data in an alterable format, CD ROM will die. the "Chief Wizard"

Apple 20 meg HD prices

JCOM

The cheapest price for an Apple 20 meg HD is $929. Don't get too excited that's the price BIG buyers can get. Hughes aircraft will buy about 7.5 million dollars worth of Apple gear next year and qualifies for a schedule 3 discount (the max). This number may be useful to you in terms of driving your best deal. After the rush wears off I think any bargainer will be able to get the HD for around $1000. At that price color me interested.

KATZ

JCOM, Maybe you should become a certified developer. My price as a developer is $750.00. The hard disk is going to be available in limited quanities at the end of the year (Nov or Dec). I got this info from Apple Developer Relations. Still waiting on the repair of the Hard Disk for the MouseHole Download. Hope to have it up and running soon. Katz.

Microsoft/Switcher

MIKE STEINER

Microsoft's official recommendations for memory sizes for MS products and Switcher:

Application Preferred Size Minimum Size

Excel 304K-512K 256K File

Chart 192K 128K

Multiplan 160K 128K

Word 160K 128K

Finder 4.49

MICRO GHOUL

I have been playing around with Finder 4.49 (and the software for the 20 meg RAM based boot) and have experienced very strange problems with 2 MB mode! Does anyone have even a cluje as to whether or not there is some reason as to why this situation exists? By the way for those of you who have not had a chance to play with it, it is hot! LOVE the new file package and real folder system! ciao, MG

PageMaker and MacDraft and Laser

BOB DENNY

The combination of PageMaker, MacDraft & Laser is a SQUIRRILY combo! After three thrilling days of trying to tame these guys, here are some nifties:

If it looks good on the screen at 4X mag, it'll look bad on the laser printed from draft. Holes, mis-aligned lines, horrid arrow heads. Group Draft pic, cut to scrap, paste in PageMaker, more wired things. The pic changes again, things don't line up, different from the Draft wierdness, laser output is sad. If you don't set "ink" on text blocks (that's right, text block), to NONE, you'll get big lines extending to the right & down from the upper left corner of each Draft-generated text block when pulled into PageMaker & laser printed. They don't show on the screen, just the printed page. Try to cut from Draft into Draw ... most things don't show up under Draw, even though the scrapbook says that the cut item consists only of a PICT resource, should be digestible by Draw. Some things that Draw cannot create show up fine when pasted in from draft. Getting arrowheads to work from Draft is impossible. And Draw as those GIGANTIC arrowheads on thick lines.