The 2MB of installed RAM is allocated approximately like this:
- 1MB is reserved for the frame buffer. This is where the page is
assembled from the PostScript descriptions sent by the computer.
- 200K is reserved for font caching, display list, and the AppleTalk
communications buffer. This is where font bitmaps are stored to speed
the font access when used again. It is also where the display list is
generated by the downloaded PostScript before it is sent to the frame
buffer for actual page description.
- 300K is reserved for the PostScript interpreter as well as the server
and user dictionaries.
- This leaves about 500K of virtual memory (VM) for fonts, prep files, and
program memory. Tech Comm checked the VM with the "vmstatus" operator
within PostScript and found that 511,316 bytes were available on a
freshly-reset LaserWriter IINT with 2MB of memory. Of that amount,
81,850 bytes were used (possibly for the PostScript interpreter), which
leaves about 429K.