

Jef Raskin's Swyft Card - sizzle
http://willegal.net/superproto/index.php?title=Swyft_Card

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davelnewton
True story:

I was at a Boston startup conference and was talking with Steve Wozniak, which
was pretty neat. I asked him about the Swyft Card, because when it was first
introduced I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I think about it once
every couple of years.

Woz thought I was talking about RFID and proceeded to tell me why all this
personal tracking was an invasion of privacy, which I was forced to agree
with, and it was interesting to hear his take on it.

At the same time, I was a little bummed we didn't talk about the Swyft Card,
because I like it, I like Forth, I like Raskin, and I like Woz.

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pietrofmaggi
Yesterday link[1] about the Swyft Card, on hack a day, includes a short video
of Mr. Willegal demoing the software.

[1] [http://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/vcf-east-the-swyft-
card/](http://hackaday.com/2014/04/06/vcf-east-the-swyft-card/)

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wmf
What did the card actually do? It looks like it's mostly a ROM. Was it
basically a dongle, storing the code in ROM instead of loading it from a
floppy that could be copied?

~~~
HillRat
Basically; it held the Cat OS and software in ROM, so it could boot
immediately and run without disk access. If you recall, the Mac had most of
its key OS functions held in ROM for the same reason, although it couldn't fit
its entire system in firmware.

As a curious aside, everything except the core Cat OS was written in Forth,
though you could also script functions through AppleBASIC (itself implemented
in ROM on the motherboard). Kind of a neat little historical appendage; if
Jobs hadn't booted Raskin from the Mac team, the Mac might well have ended up
looking like this.

~~~
wmf
I always figured the Mac toolbox was in ROM because ROM was cheaper than RAM
at that time.

