[rescue] Multia Question

[Dave McGuire]

On Tuesday, February 18, 2003, at 05:50 PM, Frank Van Damme wrote:
>>> Hmm. I've seen 266MHz 21066 CPUs for the Multia somewhere.
>>> Anyway, even if it's a crappy design altogether, it's still a cool
>>> little playtoy IMO. Heck, even a SparcStation 2 can be useful for
>>> whatever purpose they can handle. :-)
>>
>>    The difference is that a SPARCstation-2 is well designed.
>
> Well designed? Except for one thing at least. As I learned from this 
> list,
> there is something called nvram, a part attached to the main board, 
> with a
> battery inside it - battery empty means you can't boot the box anymore 
> and
> your mac adress gets reset and more evil things.
>
> This approaches the Compaq hd-based bios hack :-(

   ...and those NVRAMs typically last anywhere from 5 to 10 years.  I 
don't consider this to be a big issue.  At the time of the design of 
those systems, other types of nonvolatile memory (flash, EAROM, EEPROM, 
etc) were far too expensive.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I've grown hair again, just
St. Petersburg, FL           for the occasion."       -Doc Shipley