Msg: 2809 *Conference*
06-24-92 20:16:20
From: RICHARD HANSON
To : REED MALTZMAN
Subj: REPLY TO MSG #2797 (MERITS OF WP-2 VS. T-200)
The "slowness" is caused when you are inserting text in the middle of a large document. Slowness increases as RAM fills up. And, of course, you are dealing with a 8085 processor running at 2.7 mhz. As you insert, all of the trailing characters must be reajusted to new positions in RAM. Remember, everything is controlled by the processor following code. Through this code, characters are entered, placed, displayed, moved, etc. There is "no" magic inside a computer. In fact, there are a few things in this world you don't want to know about, i.e., how laws are made, what goes into sausages, and what happends inside a computer. Is the WP-2 "better" then a Model 200, and dose it "really" have more memory? No! and No! If you think the Model 200 is slow--a relative term--you'll think a WP-2 is "dead"!!! The WP-2 is a nice, dedicated word processing computer. It's screen is readable, and the spelling checker and thesaurus are nice features. Printing control is nice as well. But, inserting characters into the middle of a document is slooooooooow!!! As for memory (RAM), the Model 200 may have 3 banks of 24K (19,000+ bytes) each, while the WP-2 has 32K (22,000+ bytes) in one bank. In either case, temporary storage is available for each computer, i.e., rampac, and/or extRAM or XR4 for the Model 200 vs. a 128K RAM disk for the WP-2.