THANKS TO ANDY IHNATKO for promoting the donation of used computer equipment to our schools ("Outing Your Mac," November '95, page 25). Besides giving kids access to technology, there is another reason why we Mac users should give this idea serious consideration: Most donations of used equipment are from businesses that are PC-oriented. It doesn't take a Bill Gates to figure out that our classrooms could become filled with used 386-based PCs. Let's give our kids a better choice.
Jo English
DrJosey@aol.com
I APPLAUD ANDY'S suggestion to salvage an old 40-MB drive, almost laughably low-capacity for actual day-to-day use in today's world. An external drive with a bootable System Folder, Norton Utilities, and the like would have helped me out a couple of times in the past.
But there's also another use for a low-capacity drive mechanism in an external case: as a font-storage hard drive attached directly to a PostScript laser printer. If you use a lot of nonresident fonts, the time lag for downloading them during every job gets to be a drag, and printers with limited RAM can't hold more than a few at a time. But even a puny 20-MB drive can hold hundreds of fonts; attach it to the printer's SCSI port, use the downloading utility that came with the printer to format the disk, and download the fonts just once -- then sit back and relax. And as an added bonus, you can remove all those PostScript font files from your Mac's own hard disk, unless you use Adobe Type Manager or some other program that relies on their presence.
Jeff Saxe
via the Internet
ANDY'S MENTION of his Exidy computer brought tears to my eyes. My first computer was an Exidy Sorcerer. It still resides somewhere in my basement, collecting dust and wondering what ever happened to polyester suits.
It was 1978. Those sleek lines. That punchy keyboard. That joystick I soldered together. 32K of RAM! A word processor that selfishly demanded 8K of RAM. CP/M. A power supply that ran hot enough to burn toast on top of the case!
