> >
> >
> >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'm not really going to throw it away. But it should execute from rom.
PDA's were doing that before Zoomer and so were about a million other
devices. That's pretty standard programming technology. That really is
pretty sloppy.
Barry