Re: OmniGo and RAM

James W. Barr (jbarr@popmail.mcs.net)
Wed, 25 Oct 1995 07:36:18 -0500

>
>
>On Mon, 23 Oct 1995, Brian Smithson wrote:
>
>> On Oct 23, 8:58am, Dan (Shag) Birchall wrote:
>>
>> > Since "Almost 100%" of the code an OmniGo comes with is XIP, an OmniGo
>> > 100 with 1Mb of RAM and 3Mb of XIP ROM should be able to handle apps
>> as
>> > well as a Zoomer with 2-4 Mb of RAM.
>>
>> True, it should run lots of simultaneous apps, which would certainly be
>> an improvement over the Zoomer. The OmniGo 100 literature says that
>> 640KB of RAM is available for user files, and I still think that is
>> disappointingly small -- keep in mind that this storage area is for data
>> and for add-on programs.
>>
>>
>> XIP should also increase the startup speed for applications, since they
>> don't need to load into main memory from ROM prior to execution.
>
>Are you saying that the Zoomer applications don't run from ROM? If that's
>true, it's amazing. What sloppy design! I'm tempted to throw mine away.

Don't be too hasty to throw it out, although that design is true. The
Zoomer really works no different than the Desktop Ensemble package. Zoomer
sees ths ROM as a non-writable disk drive. It needs to copy apps into
working memory to run. Of course, ROM/RAM speeds are much greater than hard
disk speeds. If you think about it, though, Zoomer's performance is pretty
good considering its design -- A "first generation" PDA that sports a slick
GUI that runs on an 80186-class processor in 640K of RAM!

>I just assumed that the bulk of the memory was used by Geos.
>

Well, it is. The ROM holds all the GEOS stuff, and thr RAM is the workspace.

>Barry
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