What is Maxima?

RAM disks are created by a program that tricks your Mac into thinking that part of its RAM is a disk volume, which shows up on your desktop just like any other disk. A RAM disk, however, operates at silicon speeds, much faster than any hard drive or floppy disk. For PowerBook owners, having the system software in a RAM disk can greatly reduce the amount of time the PowerBook hard disk is spinning, significantly boosting battery life. With the introduction of System 7, Apple built its own RAM disk software into the Memory control panel. A Maxima RAM disk has several improvements over the Apple version. First, the RAM disk created by Maxima is nonvolatile, meaning the contents of the RAM disk are automatically backed up onto your hard drive and will survive a reboot.

You can also set Maxima to write-through mode, which saves to both the RAM disk and the hard disk on every Save operation. With the Apple RAM disk software, rebooting the Mac gives you a fresh, blank RAM disk. Second, Maxima uses memory-compression technology borrowed from Connectix’s RAM Doubler program to double the size of the RAM disk created by Maxima. Maxima’s installer copies the userselected System Folder or applications to the RAM disk automatically. Finally, Maxima works with several older Macs that do not support Apple’s RAM disk, such as the IIx and IIcx. Maxima runs under native mode on the Power Macintoshes.

Maxima’s limitations are few but significant (and listed in the manual). Maxima won’t work with a Mac Plus, SE, or Classic, even with an accelerator card. Only files that are limited by disk speed and not processor speed will have significant speed gains. For example, finding and sorting data in a FileMaker Pro database will be faster; but it won’t speed up 3-D rendering, which depends on processor speed.

Maxima has an Easy Install option that scans your hard drive to check the size of your System Folder and your applications. It then lists all the found applications in a dialog box and asks which applications you use the most. If your System Folder is small enough to fit in the RAM disk, Maxima copies the folder to the RAM disk and makes the RAM disk the start-up disk. The next time you boot, start-up is quicker because the system software is held in RAM. If the System Folder won’t fit on the RAM disk, Maxima allows you to place the most important components (System, Finder, and a few other files) in a System Folder on the RAM disk, then use aliases for things, like the Fonts folder. Maxima takes care of creating the stripped-down System Folder, but you must create the aliases to items within the System Folder and copy the aliases to the RAM disk. If there isn’t space on the RAM disk for even a stripped-down System Folder, Easy Install uses the application choices you made and places as many of your frequently used applications on the RAM disk as will fit.

Connectix recommends 8MB of RAM to use Maxima, and I agree (the minimum required is 4MB). With less than 8MB of RAM, you don’t have enough RAM for the RAM disk. With more than 8MB, you can allocate 4MB of RAM to the RAM disk (Maxima increases that to an 8MB RAM disk) and still have sufficient RAM to avoid out-of-memory messages.

The Last Word If you have lots of RAM (more than 8MB) and want to use some of it to speed up disk-based operations. Maxima offers an inexpensive, painless way to accomplish that goal.

Negrino, Tom. (November 1994). Maxima 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 82).

Download Maxima for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0

Compatibility notes

Minimum: System 6.0.5

Processor: 68030, 68040, PowerPC

8MB RAM recommended

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II