Jim Battle wrote:
I'd say another factor was that the mac ROMs were
quite a bit
larger than the PC BIOS of the time (512KB vs 40 KB).
The PC BIOS was 8KB. The rest of the ROM (32KB) was Microsoft BASIC.
Most (legitimate) clones didn't bother to include BASIC in ROM,
instead supplying BASIC on disk (vs. BASICA on IBM-DOS, which was an
extension to the ROM BASIC).
The original Mac ROM was 128KB.
Jim Leonard wrote:
Having them in the same place in memory seems like a
big waste of time.
Suppose you're trying to market a PC clone. How successful will you be
if some piece of popular software for the PC won't run on your clone,
because that software depends on direct calls into the ROM, or direct
access to tables in the ROM (e.g., the character generator)? Back in
those days, *lots* of software did wacky things like that.
Eric