01/30/07

Taking another stab at the silent thing:

I didn't stick with the silent IIsi for too long - most of the more interesting things I like to do require more than a pair of floppy disks. But it got me thinking, and today I tried it again, but with a twist. Remember that my IIsi has 17 megs of RAM? I used Maxima to create a 4MB space for the OS and application memory, and used the remaining 13MB for a RAM disk. That was plenty for everything I had been using - the OS, ClarisWorks, development environments, Hypercard, Bolo, etc...it all fit on the RAM disk easily. I then booted to it, unmounted the hard drive and physically disconnected the hard drive's power cable. I had disconnected the fan earlier, as it seemed difficult to do with everything running. I then put the case back on.

Am I nuts? Of course! But it works great, as long as I don't kick the power cord or have a power outage. I save all my documents (like what I'm typing now) to a floppy disk, just in case something happens to the power. Of course, everything else can be easily restored by reconnecting the hard drive. As a bonus, everything is lightning fast. I can get used to this!

I think the IIsi might be the best retro Mac built for this kind of thing. I can't think of another system that will run silently with the same upper RAM limit. The other Mac II's all have fans built into their power supplies, and I don't think disabling the fan on an SE/30 would be a good idea. Interesting!