The Outbound Laptop Mac clones from the late 80s have an interesting feature called the Silicon Disk. It's basically a RAM disk, but uses dedicated SIMMs that aren't shared with system memory. As long as the Outbound has power, it will preserve the contents of the Silicon Disk, even if the machine is shut down.
There's a brewing problem for owners of Outbounds, though. The internal hard drives are not only beginning to fail from age, but also somewhat proprietary in nature -- no easy/obvious replacement has been found for them. Outbounds don't have normal external SCSI or floppy drive ports either; owners had to use a special breakout box to get them. And of course, with Outbound systems being as rare as they are already, these accessories are pretty much impossible to find on their own. So unless you have one of the Outbound machines with only an internal floppy drive, or access to the accessories, your machine is just a hard drive failure away from being unrecoverable.
Here's my idea: Since the Silicon Disk is bootable, and uses dedicated RAM modules, would it be possible to create new ones that use flash chips instead? That way, Outbound owners could have a permanent, internal storage device that doesn't carry the risk of power loss deleting its contents. From what I can tell, there's nothing special about the RAM modules it uses either, so reverse-engineering the motherboard wouldn't necessarily need to happen (like it would to figure out how to interface a different hard drive, for example).
What I *don't* know is if creating flash-based modules is even possible or feasible. I'll admit I'm completely out of my depth when it comes to engineering such a thing, but I do know we have some crazy smart people here -- what do you think?
There's a brewing problem for owners of Outbounds, though. The internal hard drives are not only beginning to fail from age, but also somewhat proprietary in nature -- no easy/obvious replacement has been found for them. Outbounds don't have normal external SCSI or floppy drive ports either; owners had to use a special breakout box to get them. And of course, with Outbound systems being as rare as they are already, these accessories are pretty much impossible to find on their own. So unless you have one of the Outbound machines with only an internal floppy drive, or access to the accessories, your machine is just a hard drive failure away from being unrecoverable.
Here's my idea: Since the Silicon Disk is bootable, and uses dedicated RAM modules, would it be possible to create new ones that use flash chips instead? That way, Outbound owners could have a permanent, internal storage device that doesn't carry the risk of power loss deleting its contents. From what I can tell, there's nothing special about the RAM modules it uses either, so reverse-engineering the motherboard wouldn't necessarily need to happen (like it would to figure out how to interface a different hard drive, for example).
What I *don't* know is if creating flash-based modules is even possible or feasible. I'll admit I'm completely out of my depth when it comes to engineering such a thing, but I do know we have some crazy smart people here -- what do you think?
