9 Oct
2011
9 Oct
'11
7:47 p.m.
On 10/9/2011 5:16 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
:). I perhaps should have added the qualifier, "It's an interesting
idea -for a UNIX system- ..." to my original statement.
- Josh
This may be
apocryphal (I can't find a reliable source on this now that I'm
trying to look it up), but one thing I recall is that Jobs' original vision
for the optical drive was that the Cube would have *no* internal storage
(save maybe a small hard disk for paging) and each user would have their own
optical disk that the system would boot from, containing the full OS, and
the user's applications and files. It's an interesting idea, in that a user
could carry his whole world around with him.
Just like the TRS80, Apple][, 5150,
and the first Mac.
Each student could carry around a boot disk containing the OS and their
own materials.
Eventually, for those students doing stuff other than Assembly Language
programming, they would run out of space. But that is a QUANTITATIVE, not
QUALITATIVE issue.
Then we added network connection software to the student bootdisks, and
they could share some resources, even compilers.
Then the OS got too bloated to even fit on a floppy!
Progress.