3B2/600 questions

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <11826 at cbnews.ATT.COM> mvadh at cbnews.ATT.COM (andrew.d.hay,54242,wi,1d007,508 374 5484) writes:
>i'm surprised (well, a little, anyway) that small machines -- which i
>define as machines designed to be used outside a controlled
>environment -- don't have power conditioning and limited battery
>holdup *built*in*.

Well, then they wouldn't be "small" machines anymore unless....

>the battery would only have to last for a few minutes -- long enough to
>catch sigpwr and shut down. (perhaps init s would be the fastest way...)
>this would be redundant if you have a real ups, but it would still give
>you a little extra insurance against system problems.

As a builtin for emergencies only, it might just park the disk heads and
support only the RAM.  A tiny battery could do this for hours and then
pick up exactly where things left off.  Some of the Toshiba laptop PC's
have a feature like that to maintain work in progress with minimal
battery drain.  Under unix, some things might be confused by skipping
an interval of time, though, and you would lose most of the terminal
connections anyway.

Les Mikesell
  les at chinet.chi.il.us