On 2004.7.15, at 11:20 AM, John Klos wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> I've got a IIci on which I'm running NetBSD/mac68k.
>>
>> However, every time I power it off, when it comes back up, 32-bit
>> addressing is disabled in the control panels and the booter refuses to
>> boot in consequence.
>
> ...
>
>> Now, it also loses the time when I power down, from which I infer that
>> some internal battery is dead or some such.  But how could that affect
>> Control Panel settings?  They're saved on disk, no?

68K era Macs were designed for a world in which  20 MB hard drives cost 
more than $500. (How much more, I am just as glad to forget.) There 
were UV EPROMs when the original Mac was designed, but no EEPROMs, and 
FLASH was just a gleam in a solid-state engineer's eye.

No operating system, just the Mac as a big (200KB or so of object was 
big back then.) application to embed other apps in. You were lucky if 
you had two floppies so you could keep the Mac+App on one and your data 
on the other.

And, yeah, if you get the idea that you'd tend to end up with a floppy 
for each major app, and a slightly tuned version of the Mac "system" on 
each floppy, you'd be getting a fairly accurate picture.

The battery backed up RAM was a good solution for certain control-panel 
settings back then.

>>   Certainly the date
>> and time format settings are saved across power-downs; I tried it.
>
> What about the date and time? Are they saved?

You know, I have often thought that it really wouldn't have been a bad 
idea to save the date-time on power-down on whatever the boot medium 
was. Of course, you'd need an extra couple of bits in date-time 
records, one to tell you the system time was known to be bad, and 
another to tell you that the date was no-earlier-than whatever the 
numbers said. Such a scheme would definitely have helped trying to 
track versions.

> I generally buy two AA batteries and a two AA battery holder and 
> solder the leads to the mb battery holder. AA are much cheaper, easier 
> to find, and last a long time. If you want to get fancy, you can even 
> get lithium AA.

Three AAAs on my p630, but I haven't had the ambition to do it for the 
3.6V on the p550 yet.

--
Joel Rees
     Getting involved in the neighbor's family squabbles is dangerous.
     But if the abusive partner has a habit of shooting through his/her 
roof,
     the guy who lives upstairs is in a bit of a catch-22.