Pierre Dandumont has saved a long-lost bit of Macintosh history:
If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions. But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM.
I had talked about this mysterious ROM a few years ago. It’s documented by Apple in some old documents, but without much detail. According to Apple, the ROM contains fonts for kanji in 12 and 18 points, and they are loaded at startup by KanjiTalk. On a regular Macintosh Plus, you need a floppy disk with the files, which slows down startup and uses some RAM, whereas on a Japanese Macintosh Plus, the font is in ROM and doesn’t take up RAM. You also avoid loading files from a floppy disk, theoretically saving 6 seconds during startup. That’s a conservative estimate, as we’ll see—it assumes you’re not switching disks manually.
Pierre then went on to order not one but two Macintosh Plus logic boards to track down and preserve the ROM. The entire blog post is a delight, as are the photos:
