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Pitting a Mac Plus Against an AMD Dual Core
In the Age of Computer Bloat someone has decided to do a performance comparison between a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core, each running appropriate software. Computer Bloat does not fare so well. "In order to keep the hoots and hollers of 'unfair comparison' at a minimum, we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible. We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience... And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications."
He likes ice cream. Spoon it right into the "cup holder" and he might grant you a wish!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I cannot really agree with these tests that just compare "start up tasks" like opening a file or booting the OS. There often is a good reason not to focus too much on these events, because don't happen that often. Responsiveness during use is a better comparison, and this is much harder. Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done. And while opening a file 0.2 seconds faster will not really improve my productivity by much, having instant access to Google and Wikipedia does.
But anyway: Here is a quote from Andy Hertzfeld about how Steve Jobs motivated them to make the Mac boot faster (taken from the documentary The triumph of the nerds by Robert X. Cringley.)
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Once benchmark was copy and paste, which wasn't supported in linux until 2004.
*** the webserver lost
I guess they chose to use it as their webserver.
As with this article, what really would that prove?
I think I would find my words per minute would not vary. The legibility of the document would be identical. I could even say that the typewriter is superior in some ways - for instance, my document autosaves on every keystroke.
Calling features "bloat" strikes me the same as when a person will call a reason an "excuse". There are times and places when "bloat" and "excuses" are valid words, but they can be inserted where they are invalid just as easily.
Perhaps the law of diminishing returns holds true. After all, a typewriter really is all one needs to write a novel, and in fact I do not think a computer helps one write a novel thousands of times more quickly. However, there are features (spell check, formatting, fonts, predictive text, voice recognition...) that enhance the writing experience.
I guess I just don't get the point of this article.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Why didn't he compare the Mac Plus against an OS X machine, or the XP machine against a DOS 6 machine?
Also nice how everything that the Mac Plus (and old machines in general) sucked at or couldn't do were left out. Making such a big deal out of startup time seems pretty pointless too.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
It's not about what you need, it's about getting you on the relentless upgrade treadmill, convincing you that you want more stuff that you didn't need before, engineering more sloppily so you need faster hardware to go along with it...
I browsed the WWW up to 1995 using Compuserve on a Mac Plus, wrote e-mail in WinCIM, ran MS Word, knocked together a few useful apps in what was initially Think C. I'm no gamer, so all I've really gained since then is a bigger screen (even colour is overrated for me, though I understand that's nice as a cue for some people). For a Unix box I ran RiscBSD (NetBSD/arm26) on a 30 MHz ARM610 Acorn RiscPC, a not-entirely-unpopular UK home computer of the day.
having a bigger screen is big boost and the old mac may have a hard time driving one with an external dongle
The Mac Plus (of which I was a former owner) is a quintessential example of Apple's past design principles in terms of quality (recent examples such as the Macbooks, which I also own, are having nasty hardware and QC issues). The fact that you can get this old Mac to speak "internet" and continue to run (it has only a SCSI-25 interface for drives and other peripherals) is a testament to good design, whether you're an Apple fan or not.
Finding a contemporary IBM PC to do the same performance test would be more appropriate and interesting, but connectivity and functionality there (it was built years before Windows) would be a big challenge under the non-graphical DOS, if not impossible. I don't know if there's even a Linux out there that could understand that old PC technology. I'm sure it could be done--I just wouldn't want to be the one to try.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Software from 1986 didn't have scalable fonts, 32-bit colour, etc, but the interface was usually snappy. Menus dropped down snappily, and dialog boxes opened immediately, for example.
Operations that took a long time (such as reflowing a page in a desktop publishing program) at least appeared deterministic - you knew it would take a second or two to reflow, so you weren't anxiously waiting for the system to do something.
Paid Q&A/Research
I admit the while I do a lot of work in programs like Word and Excel, I spend a lot more time surfing the net, reading articles from online databases, watching videos and otherwise doing a great many things that the Mac Plus can't do at all.
Personally, I consider a computer that is offline to be basically unusable, unless I specifically loaded it with something to do ahead of time (i.e. copied data from my work database so I can work on a flight.) This is absurd.
"All they care about is how it works and how quickly it does the tasks we most often ask it to do."
"The computers were not connected to the Internet or a LAN"
How can they test "the tasks that we most often do", when "the computers were not connected to the Internet"?
Browsing and email are are most common tasks.
Since there were no browsers or email readers for the Mac in 1986, this test is not really valid.
Guess we've established that the Mac Plus was not the best choice for hosting the web site?
Three Squirrels
I have without delay submitted a tech request for a 1986 Mac Plus. I expect to soon be the envy of all the other developers, who will remain stuck with their kickas^H^H^H pointless workstations.
I like basketball!!1!
Nowadays, the computer does a lot of the pre-printing tasks before actually sending the page to be rendered to the printer. In the eighties, the printer did all the work. It would really be interesting to add numbers about printing speed using about the same technology. I think printing would be faster in the eighties than it is now.
I've been troubled for years on how generational improvements in computation equipment don't seem to result in improved USER experience. Now, important to realize that in the comparisons selected, we're talking about 1-bit bit-mapped operations on a screen 512x368 in size (from memory - might have botched the Y coord limit). Might be interesting to see what happens on that PC when dropping the display to 640x480 and 256 colors. That'd be a little closer to apples-apples comparison.
I digress. The point is - nothing seems much better in the user experience than before, for the vast majority of things we do - and that includes MacOS X, to my thinking. Nothing that makes me jump up and down and twist and shout anyway. What apps have I added in the last 10 years? Music players. Video players. Browsers. Pretty much it. I wonder where the hell my 4.5 billion clock cycles a second are actually going.
I don't know - computing just doesn't seem very exciting anymore. Help.
sloth jr
The constant blather about comparing it to "AMD" really speaks volumes about the author. Apparently AMD determines your user experience on a modern PC running XP.
Oh, and browsing the web plays no part in the modern user experience. None at all. Don't even think about it. If most people weren't doing it in '86, it's not important.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
I used vi on a VT100 attached to a vax running BSD back in 1990 and I use vi (vim) today on a MacBook Pro that could handle more simultaneous users than the vax did. It was always fast to start then, and it's fast to start today, though now I have colors, split windows, and a bajillion other features I struggle to remember.
It's interesting to see that the machines have gotten faster, software more complex, etc., etc., but software like vim just keeps on truckin'. Too bad we don't have more software like this.
It ignores other factors such as relative price. Of course the server is apparently being run on a Mac plus so I can't go back and check the article to see if they listed the specs of the current PC, but a Mac Plus cost about $2500 when it was introduced. Now, take $2500 in 1986 dollars and you get about $4500 in today's dollars. Well, $4500 buys you a shitload of computer. You can get a much better processor than they had, 4GB of RAM, a hardware RAID controller with a bunch of disks and so on. Load up something like that and see what your launch times are like. Given that the system they are using probably is less than $2000 in today's dollars, you aren't even close money wise.
However as you said, it doesn't really matter as the computers are performing on totally different levels. In every way a new system does more than a Mac Plus. Even if you dismiss the usefulness of multi-tasking and look at just the app there's huge improvements. One would be the in-line spell checker. As I'm sure this post is revealing I'm a horrible speller. However in Word it is great, it will check spelling as I go along. After a few times of correcting the same mistake, it just starts auto correcting. It gets to the point where once I've trained a copy I can type a document and it is good to go as it has fixed all the problems.
This is just another example of the great Benjamin Disraeli quote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Or in other words, you can twist around a test in almost any way you like to make it come out with a result that you want. However that doesn't mean that it has any relevance.
The metrics they use are neither here no there. If they really want to see whether computers have improved over the decades, they should compare the time it takes to achieve actual tasks. For example, they could have compared how long it took two users to create a document, perform calculations, make a spreadsheet, etc.
Using real world tasks, you get a better idea of how the computer affects productivity. Many of the benchmarks used for performing comparisons have little relationship with actual productivity.
Only the AMD dual core can run Clippy while you go about your work, that's the only thing that matters in my book...
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
They should compare a Mac+, AMD Dual Core and a Commodore 64 when playing Pong.
Then try running a Mac Plus *emulator* on modern hardware. I'd like to know how it measures up against the Real Thing, but I'd be surprised if it won't outrun the Real Thing by a factor gazillion.
If you measure productivity by response times, run software that is more responsive. Your hardware gives you that choice. Ever tried running Windows 3.1 on a 200 MHz pentium? It really *flies*.
Oh, and by the way- for fair comparison, also run a dual core emulator on the Mac Plus. I guess we have advanced after all.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I've been thinking about this for quite a while -- why hasn't anyone brought out an OS that's designed for modern hardware, but has nothing but speed in mind. I mean -- I want a GUI and all, but nothing slower than fluxbox. Isn't there a niche for shipping an OS that wrings every last drop of thrust from yer box while maintaining a semi-pretty user interface via wmii or something?
The Mac Plus can double as a fish tank!. The iMac could make a tank for flounder I suppose...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
"Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the "User Experience" has not changed much in two decades.' The point they are trying to make is that while hardware has advanced considerably and software has added capability the actually base user interface and thus user experience has not changed much in 20 years. The authors don't go into the "why" and do show some personal bias and opinion... but they have a point... and, yes, I still own a functioning MacPlus.
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
The anthropic principle helps to explain why this comparison makes no sense. By virtue of the fact that both computers are market-ready and market-tested machines (especially in the highly successful Mac Plus), their usability speeds MUST be under or around market-acceptable levels. Otherwise, they would either not have survived alpha and beta testing or not have survived as a marketable product. What this comparison is really tapping into is the user-acceptable speed level, which has not changed since the 1980s (because humans haven't changed much).
----
"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
I submitted this from my 1985 Amiga to proved that even a 1986 Mac is bloated and slow.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
... complaining about the software guys
This is proof positive that Steve Jobs traveled to the alternate future in the Dolorean Woz invented to subsequently steal all his technology from the Amiga intergalactic headquarters on Lunar Base Lorannie.
Then one day Bill Gates found Steve's copy of the "Workbench 3.1 Users Guide" sitting in the Delorean, and hijacked it traveling back in time to give his younger self a copy, and therefore, the keys to a multi-billion dollar future of corrupt monopolies.
Things like start up are silly to compare because they have far more to do with system configuration than processor power. I had an old Via 600 machine that could start most apps in seconds but was rediculously slow. Traditional benchmarks are the standard for a reason. In some ways rendering has only increased marginally over the years but that is because demand has gone up dramatically. A frame I render now in minutes on one machine might have taken months to render with a render farm fifteen years ago but length of time each frame takes to render hasn't changed as much, it's demand that has changed. It's really apples and oranges comparing what we were doing years ago with today. Systems are drastically faster and more powerful. For all my complaints even the OSs have gotten faster and more powerful, mainly OSX since they finally shed the old OS. I'm more interested in real world comparisons of Windows, OSX and Linux. I just wish some one would do an unbiased across the board comparison. Almost every review is done by people that favor one system. I have a personal favorite based on my experience but it's not the best in every area. There needs to be reviews comparing the systems based on Office apps, graphic apps and gaming. Those three things provide a good watermark to judge strengths and weaknesses on.
I don't see how I can take seriously any comparison of "typical computer use" that excludes web browsing. They claim "zero advance in productivity" but completely overlook the fact that "productivity" is probably just a small fraction of overall computer use.
If you exclude web browsing, online gaming, recreational photo editing, music recording, video editing, etc. then you're probably excluding 50-90% of modern computer use.
So yes, for the couple of percent of people whose needs were completely satisfied by a Mac Plus in the 80s it might be best to never upgrade. The rest of us are spending lots of time doing things that we simply couldn't do on computers in the 80s. Whether you consider our activities "productive" or not is just splitting hairs and arguing semantics.
Response time is important. To most users, the interface is 99.9% of the system; they don't care what's under the hood.
Here's a question that might be worth considering: Have computer OS makers kept the response of computers relatively constant by accident or design? We've gotten used to working a a particular pace that, at least according to this article, hasn't changed significantly in 20 years. Once you accept that pace as the norm, you either don't think to try to change it or avoid changing it so you don't get out of your rhythm.
One aspect of indirect control, from a behavioral standpoint, is that we can feel in control of a situation merely by being able to predict when something will happen. If a computer responds faster than we can keep up, it might be a little disconcerting.
Then again, I'm inclined to think that it's accidental. Has anyone ever told you an app ran too fast?
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
I still run a large number of applications in emulators because the older software was faster per clock cycle than current software. Being a software engineer I have seen the bloat of software and the unnecessary effect it has on computer hardware. There are a select number of small applications, mostly embedded, that have benefited from More's law, but on the average software has actually gotten slower rather than faster.
Not to mention the fact that I am currently being of little productive value myself as I waste valuable time on this comment.
Both OS's have a drawing tool like Mac Counterpart of MS Paint and say Photoshop on windows for simular tasks. I bet working with that tool set will show some improvements on the AMD. I remember Flood Fills on Older Computers being quite slow, I use to draw stick men and put my mouse on the bottom of the screen to do a flood fille to animate Lava flowing up, or the stick man has a Gun and I make lines in the background and click on the flood fill so it looks like they are shooting a gun at them in slow motion (video game speed). On new systems Flood fill, heck most filters out perform the old system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.
I don't think anyone's stopping him from typing up his article on a Mac Plus, but I'm guessing he didn't. If we look at what he's really comparing, which is System 6.0.8 and Windows XP (not the hardware, which would yield some non-surprising but real results), the differences are not terribly surprising; you would likely find similar results comparing System 6.0.8 and any iteration of MacOS X. The difference between newer OS's and System 6.0.8 is choice. If you're annoyed with boot up times or how slow certain tasks are, there are usually ways to speed it up; disable some services, disable visual effects, etc.
System 6.0.8 is not only a lot more compact since it has far fewer (mostly useless) features and therefore less code to process, but also because it was written in assembly code instead of the higher level language C. The lower the level of the code language, the less processing cycles are required to get something done.
The majority of slashdot readers should be raising their nose at the scent of bullshit from this comment. Just some pithy statement that most people will believe to lend credence to the results they were searching for before they even started testing. This isn't news, it's Fox news.
At least they are honest - but I am spoiled with my Matrox G550, I can't go back to 1280x1024. Coincidentally, just recently I happened to skim the article found by the Google query (( BRUMME MTA PUMPING )), that is, "Apartments and Pumping in the CLR". Go ahead, start with your clean sheet of paper, then "how are you going to implement OBJECTS" ? COM is *such* a mess, nextStep was going to have OBJECTS too, the world awaits your better mousetrap !
Did you ever have the screen black out on you, and you'd have to hit the case on the side to bring it back on a Mac Plus?
That was because the power supplies would overheat due to lack of air circulation. And once that happened, the power supply was toast, even on cool down. Replacing the PS was the solution.
This result (what I can glean from comments, as the site is being pounded) doesn't surprise me.
.... I have (single-CPU) WinXP machines (haven't stepped up to any dual-cores yet, but I wonder what good it'll do), have run a couple GUI-distros of Linux on them over the years and have seen Apples at work--and nothing new I've yet seen is as fast as that clunker 98 box is, running 98. :|
I have an aging Win98-era Pentium II@350 Mhz with 392 megs of RAM, and running Win98, it simply flies.... I keep it around to run some era programs I like, and every time I power it up, I am simply stunned all over again at how blazingly fast it responds. It responds to user input and opens regular programs noticeably faster than the few computers I've bought since--computers that have faster drives, much faster CPU's and way more RAM.
Of course Win98 has a number of problems now--a lot of vulnerabilities and no antivirus I know of still supports it, so getting online is walking in a minefield. And even used for local apps it needs to be rebooted every 4-6 hours to be safe... but even then, warm-rebooting only takes like 20 fucking seconds, and that's just the usual OS install, no optimization ever undertaken. Did we used to bitch about bootup times? Have they gotten longer or shorter?
For a whlie I had Mandrake on it too, but Mandrake ran like a dog. With Linux and WinXP there's all this fucking-about with the hard drive that has to occur, for some reason..... any time you do something, even with the hard drives spinning, these bigger/better OS's seemto have to go off and piss away a couple seconds before actually doing anything.
All your boxen belong to bloat.
~
A better comparison might be between my 1980s NeXT station - 25 MHz CPU Megapixel colour monitor and my PC running windows. Seriously you really do wonder where all the power of the PC is going and can only conclude that Windows is a poorly written bloated piece of shite.
This comparison is intentionally self-limiting because it looks only at tasks you can perform on Old PC and measures them against performing the same tasks on New PC. It may well be that New PC does not offer measurable gains on those narrowly defined tasks compared to Old PC.
But New PC allows you do to a whole range of New Tasks, which could be performed only with great difficulty, expense, or not at all on Old PC. Examples, some of which have already been echoed here, include web browsing, gigabit networking, voip (realtime compression), and just about every sort of multimedia task you can name. Manipulating 5 megapixel photos? Probably impossible on Old PC; a cakewalk on New PC.
Five years ago an organization I worked with marveled at how we could put together a large reference book with full color, high resolution photography, for a major brand publisher, using just a few run-of-the-mill desktop computers. At the time, most of us could remember when "desktop publishing" meant, at best, laying out a high school newspaper.
Now, invest that same money from five years ago into desktop PC's of today. Instead of desktop publishing, you could probably cut a feature length high-definition film.
Not only can New PC do far more than Old PC ever could, but more people can do more things with New PC. Productivity HAS increased because more people can be more productive in more domains. New technology lowers the cost of entry to productivity, allowing your small business, or even your home user, to accomplish what was available only exclusively and at great expense years prior. New PC democratizes access to productivity. Go look at YouTube. (Also a good example of counter-productivity, but that's another discussion.)
The majority of comments supporting the thesis of TFA are textbook examples of taking the present for granted.
A lot of those "frills" are taken for granted in the user experience. My OS seems to have a similar response to a 1986 Mac ... all while running many tasks at once including media players, file servers, etc, etc, etc.
I want to see that 16MHz 68000 decode an MP3 in realtime [or faster] and have CPU to spare to do anything else.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I know all i need to know about that subject :(
:/ Otherwise the remote terminals 400 miles away is faster than mine 25ft away from server. The old box running like a 1.4Ghz P4 and win98 with AV/firewall feels just like the old remote terminals on a 1200 baud line :O
I found it takes a 2GHz w/HT or better windows box to emulate a dumb terminal without a noticable lag because of AV/firewall in the background
Oh, and why can't my 2.4GHz XP box keep up with my 386 in a DOS database program? An extra couple billion cycles and it can't fake it?
Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done.
Yeah, I think that "blown TCP/IP" is a M$ thing. Mac plus can run a TCP/IP stack, I've seen a website run from a Lisa2.
DSL, feather and 40 MB GNU/Linux live CDs make it all look bloated. The nifty thing about free software is that you can still run the older less bloated versions on new hardware and there are whole distributions tuned to do just that with improvements. Free software has "it never goes away" long term credibility. Non free does not. This is why free software users are happy with old hardware and why low power devices can be used for normal tasks without sacrificing much.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Clock cycles and memory are cheap. Programmer expertise and time is not. This situation is exactly the inverse to the situation in the era of the Mac where the hardware was much more expensive and the wages on the programmers was less significant (largely because fewer programmers where needed for the smaller projects of the day). Theoretically one could write modern software with an assembler - but who could afford to pay for the development time being increased by at least a factor of four.
And there is no escaping this simple fact -- the more resources a computer has, the more resources it needs to keep track of its resources. A Commodore 64 needed to use roughly 6 K of it's memory to keep track of what was in the other 58 K. This is no different from a modern OS needing about a 1 gig footprint to track the other 4 to 16 gig of RAM, not to mention everything else going on.
...their usability speeds MUST be under or around market-acceptable levels...
"Market acceptable" is a measurement that is not static.
Let's look at the convention wisdom on boiling frogs. Supposedly, if you put them in boiling water they will hop right out - but if you put them in a vat of cold water, they will stay in the pot as you progressively heat it to boiling.
The computer industry has been boiling frogs (where we are all the frogs) for twenty years or so, where the next generation of computers are just a little slower with each iteration. It's not much slower, and offers a bit more, so people accept it - and along with it a new definition of "market acceptable".
So it's not like this article is not raising some really valid points.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb]
:-] server ... offline:
e =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6
(Valley Girl) O-M-G !!!
ALL the women want me.
I AM leet.
Seriously, it runs a [small
http://www.machttp.org/modules.php?op=modload&nam
Like others:
http://www.ld8.org/servers/servers.html
It's 21 years old for Christ's sake. My Wife has a PowerMac 2x 2,5 MHz G5 and it *feels* snappier than that.
The point is BIGGER MHz EVEN BIGGER bloat, we've gained so little.
The constant "arms race" of MHz to bloat makes most gains moof, er - moot.
Further:
http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/plus.shtml
http://lowendmac.com/musings/macplus.shtml
http://macplus.mia.net/
http://www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/
Mactracker:
http://www.mactracker.ca/
~hylas
Spybot S&D from safer-networking.org or just Google it... but then install and goto Mode -> Advanced... then down to tools on the left and viola! Startup... Best. Windows. Program. Ever. Lots of nifty stuff on there to tool around with...
Walk with Music;
Let the battle rage for all time and space!
The real issue here is not if an "AMD system" is faster than a "Mac". For that, they would have to test exactly the same software, not different versions of it. The issue is if modern software, running on modern hardware, is faster than old software, running on old hardware.
For "interactive" tasks it usually isn't, and for a good reason.
No one cares if a program takes 1.4 seconds to complete a find & replace instead of 0.8 seconds. No one cares if a program takes 5.4 seconds to start instead of 3.9. If it took 20, then yes, people probably would care. You see, for interactive tasks, time is the fixed value. Specifically, the time that people don't mind waiting (which varies depending on how common that task is, of course).
This article just proves Murphy's laws of computation: data expands to fill all available space, processing expands to fill all available time, etc..
It's the same thing with games. I could probably take a game from 1995 and run it at 400 fps on my modern hardware. But if I can run a much better-looking version at 60 or even 30 fps, I'll probably pick that one instead. If it ran at 5 fps, I would rather play the old one.
There is a point beyond which "more features" (or "prettier graphics" or whatever) is worth more than an increase in "reaction speed".
That is why CPU-intensive tasks (the ones that never feel "fast enough") are the right way to test hardware; because they tell you how fast the thing can run, and not how fast the developers decided it should run to avoid annoying the user while appealing to as many people as possible (by including extra features).
The article's conclusion that there is "zero advance in productivity" is meaningless. Even if we take one of the most common operations (find & replace), does anyone really believe that, if it completed 1 second faster, people would be noticeably "more productive"...? In this kind of task, "productivity" depends 99% on the human part of the system.
All computers with software a fraction of the size runs faster, who doesn't know that.
The idea is that todays software provides more functionality which is something you can't realistically benchmark in this article.
You should have compared it to something a little more realistic such as Office 97 or sooner. People want all those options for the most part and that is actually why they pay for them, not simply because there is no other option which is just failed market propaganda.
So the conclusion is that with more flexibility and hundreds of more options you take a performance hit. How could that not have been the conclusion anyway.
I think a better question to ask is how a fantasy world would form around developers who enjoy writting entire office suites in assembly language and how long it would take to pump out applications of todays complexity without becoming 'bloated' when compared to programs from 20 years ago. The obvious evolution of programs was always going to include extended peroids of bloatware since there is a massive and constant demand for programs and programmers.
Until there is a surplus of quality programs you have to face the reality that bloatware is what you can expect. It's has little to do with the technical details of the platform of language but rather the deadlines that the free market endorse as highly profitable. Bloatware is a result of free market economics and little need or desire to tailor your apps to low end computers. While we can all dream that software gets faster and faster in most cases, it doesn't because it is ultimately designed to do more and more each time.
Only a person who's never had to use a typewriter could think of it the way they think of a word processor. People dedicated their lives to typing and made careers out of doing it well. The average person gave their hand written manuscripts to secretaries who typed them, if and only if it had to be published. Word processing is much faster, if you have reasonable software. This is why people spent thousands of dollars on computers that did little more than spell check and print.
The authors fairly compare user experience. Things like typing and scrolling lag matter. If you have too much of either, a typewriter might be faster. Of course it takes a lot of lag to make up the time it takes liquid paper to dry.
Did you forget about Liquid Paper? You might have if you used IBM's correctable type ribbons.
You are right about legibility though. OCR can eat typed pages and then your typed manuscript can be modified and duplicated like any other electronic document.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I call it being able to surf Wikipedia, Google, and Slashdot in a tabbed browser while running a program like Seti@home in the background with Winamp, Excel, Word and Outlook all readily available at the touch of a button (alt-tab) through mapped servers that centrally store my work. (let's not forget WoW running windowed in the background so I can watch my auctions). Oh, I probably shouldn't leave out the firewalls, the AV software, the synchronization/connection with my PDA, the EPO client, the dual 21" LCDs driven at 1600x1200 EACH, and the fact that all of it pops up on my screen within a second if I want it.
Gee. I guess I don't call that bloat at all. I call it multi-tasking. Let's see a computer from 1986 do that.
So let me get this straight. Someone's complaining that a computer today can do all of this but that dialog boxes pop up a little slower? Then go back to using your '86 Mac. I'm quite happy with what I have today, thank you.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I guess I don't really understand what's really being show here. That a word processor and a spreadsheet haven't really gotten any "faster" since 1986? Duh. If all you want to do with your computer is word processing and some simple spreadsheet stuff, I'd agree that nothing has really gotten better.
But, of course I tell you this on a computer currently with 15-20 different windows open running a development environment, instant-messaging, multiple ssh sessions, browsers with multiple tabs, all connected to a global and local network.
Maybe you don't want to do any of these things, and that's fine. But it's pretty idiotic to compare two computers 21 years apart and not include all the stuff you couldn't do with it in 1986.
AccountKiller
Finding a contemporary IBM PC to do the same performance test would be more appropriate and interesting,
My first "real" computer was a PC running DOS 6.2 and I kept it running until 2000 or so. It was fast because it used a character display. Word Perfect had good printer drivers and could give GUI previews if you wanted. Later versions ran WSWYG, but most people preferred character display. I still have a preference for the function key menu system.
It was faster than Mac and the "modern" winDOS by extension. Lag times were low. The same softare is nearly instantaneous on more modern hardware or dosbox. Before you go running out to buy old stuff, you should look into emacs which does the same things just as quickly and is free.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible. ... And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications.
/. *thinking* of to give this rubbish free publicity?
Well, if you designed these tests of performance to IGNORE performance and focus on UI operations which tend to always take the same amount of time because that's exactly the amount of time people will tolerate before they perceive it as slow, then YES, there is no improvement.
Clicking a button to bring up a window has ALWAYS taken about the same amount of time -- the amount of time that people will stand for. Lately, OSes have been able to put some drop-shadowing and stuff in, but the *time taken* stays the same.
Let me restate your 'conclusion':
"When we test only operations that are pretty much independant of the system's performanoe, systems with high performance do no better than those with lower performance."
Or, even more simply:
"HA11O! We Are f0olz!@"
Now, test those two systems on finding the risk of a bond portfolio, or applying a Photoshop filter, or compiling 100,000 lines of code and hey! look! when we choose a test that's performance-related, suddenly high performance is good!
What is
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Oh please, not any more than the Mac Plus did. Stop romanticizing the past as if it was error-free:
From Wikipedia:
The lack of fan could cause the life of a Macintosh Plus to end early for some users. As the power supply would heat up, solder joints inside it would fracture causing a bright vertical power line to run down the center of the screen.
From the debut of the Macintosh 128K through the Macintosh Plus, various third-party cooling add-ons were available to help increase airflow through the unit (including the fanless Mac Chimney which cooled by convection). Apple finally reorganized the Compact Macintosh case to accommodate a fan with the release of the Macintosh SE. Another popular remedy was to create more vents so that more air could escape.
"Sufferin' succotash."
And even if it does require 500X more memory than 20 years ago, memory is how many times cheaper and faster today than then?
Why not compare printers as well? An 8ppm Apple LaserWriters for big $$$'s against what today?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If this was an honest comparison, rather than thinly veiled Windows bashing, you'd be comparing a Mac 6.0.8 against the latest OS/X. But then one of the Apples would have to look bad. Since a modern Apple is reasonably comparable to a modern Windows PC in basic functions of 20 years ago expecially (does your Apple really scroll that much faster than XP?), you would have gotten pretty similar results to the ones against modern Windows -- which is obviously not what you wanted.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's really a test of ancient MacOS vs. Windows rather than a processor test. I think that's obvious, though, but the title of the article doesn't really do that braindead obvious point much justice.
I have an old Mac LC (circa 1991) running Kanjitalk System 6 (Japanese Mac OS) which goes from power on to desktop in 15 seconds. (I think the plain old US English System OS gets there in 8 seconds.) It's full power ready to use, not loading any extra startup/background apps. I imagine the Mac Plus boots in about the same.
My iMac running Tiger and my Vista (Basic) laptop each take 2 minutes
Over the course of a month, suppose one startup per day:
Mac LC: 15 sec x 30 days = 7.5 minutes
Modern box: 2 min x 30 days = 1 hour
So that's an hour per month (half a day per year,) spent staring at the computer starting up (remember, these modern OS' require you to log in, so you can't just walk away during the boot process.)
In what way is X Window cut n paste not as simple as that? The only time I've had it not that simple was running windows prorgams under citrix and that was windows ignoring the copy buffer sometimes (maybe because it was bigger than 256 bytes content). And that's either citrix or windows.
How about Windows cnp? Highlight text, Ctrl-C, click somewhere else, Ctlr-V. A lot more difficult, and when you get used to the X copy buffer, you spend a lot of time, middle clicking to paste highlighted content into another text area and swearing to yourself.
Fuck! Where the hell can I get an old Mac Plus ???!
Eroom's Law: Every 18 months, computer software requires twice the computing power to operate.
This is the counter to Moore's law and explains why the testing achieved the results they did.
Brian
> UI responsiveness is definitely king No matter what I have tried, Firefox always took longer to start and even though I am pro open source I use IE. BTW why do you have to be "motivated" to make MacOS start faster? What about self-motivation?
I remember reading a review of Windows 2.0 where the reviewer complained that Windows 2.0 "turned my brand new 12MHz 80286 computer into my old 4.77MHz 8085."
The more the hardware improves, the more programmers are able to suck the improved performance into oblivion.
One: The frog thing is a myth (http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/frogboil.asp) .
Second: Computers have been getting faster, I don't know where you've been. I happen to work in a place that has computer ranging over a wide time scale and I'd much, much rather work on a latest gen system with all the "bloat" than an older machine. Try going back to using a single task computer (which is what the Mac Plus was, multi finder didn't come till OS6) and tell me how much better it is. Sure, preemptive multitasking adds overhead but I'd much rather have it than not.
I don't really care if an app launches in 2 seconds or 3, that's all fast enough. What I care about is my overall computer experience. Having all my system power thrown at a single task so that I could open Word faster wouldn't be better for me. I'd rather have it take the one second that it does (that's what it takes on my system) and be able to run other programs than have some stripped down system where it takes 0.01 seconds. To me, there difference in speed doesn't matter even though its a couple orders of magnitude since both are fast enough.
If you really think that new computers are slower, well, try it some time. Get yourself a current, high end system and an old, high end system. Load them up and see how it goes. Say a Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM and XP or Vista vs a 386 with 4MB of RAM and Windows 3.1. You'll probably find that some of the basics like opening a menu are of similar speed but then try and do something more, like say print a multi page document and surf the web at the same time.
It doesn't take much time using an old computer to make you truly appreciate how much better new computers are.
You right click on the misspelt word and select from a list.
You can still criticize it for having the vocabulary of an illiterate mongoloid hooked on ebonics, if that makes you feel better.
Second: Computers have been getting faster, I don't know where you've been. I happen to work in a place that has computer ranging over a wide time scale and I'd much, much rather work on a latest gen system with all the "bloat" than an older machine. Try going back to using a single task computer (which is what the Mac Plus was, multi finder didn't come till OS6) and tell me how much better it is. Sure, preemptive multitasking adds overhead but I'd much rather have it than not.
I agree the single task computers were slower for some things. However, as the test shows not all of them - word processing in WordPerfect with reveal codes was much faster than Word with the same quality of output, as was modifying LaTEX in Emacs.
In particular for overall user experience, I rate my work on Sun workstations with X-Windows as more responsive than modern Windows computers I use today. I even have a Linux system that feels a bit slower and more sluggish than those used to (though undoubtedly be falling back to an older window manager I could regain at least some of that speed).
Yes if you are doing something computer intensive you'll notice the new hardware difference. But it's not hardware we are talking about, it's OS overhead. And that has been getting worse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a screen 512x368 in size (from memory - might have botched the Y coord limit)
You did. 512x384.
(Mac Plus was the first computer I personally owned.)
you had me at #!
System 6.0.8 is not only a lot more compact since it has far fewer (mostly useless) features and therefore less code to process, but also because it was written in assembly code instead of the higher level language C. The lower the level of the code language, the less processing cycles are required to get something done.
--
More productive? No, its wasting clock cycles to tick me off and slow me down even further.
I tested my Treo 700 phone against my old Motorola "Brick" and it took the same amount of time to dial a phone number. Why not compare Univac to Deep Blue? Cmon I expect better from /. .
With having to reboot more than once a month to keep current and "secure", I think boot time matters. Unless the OS developers start getting back into run-time patching (isn't that what a hotfix is really supposed to be?), it doesn't seem like we can just write off boot times. Think of it like Steve was quoted saying in the above comment: say you, as a regular Joe (minus MS and Apple server/admin tools) administrate a computer lab with 30 units. You upgrade each computer on the bi-weekly basis that updates are churned out; a difference in boot time from 5 seconds to 60 seconds is the difference between having the computers ready in a few minutes vs half an hour. With the current mentality of the popular commercial OS's to gratuitously force reboots for the hell of it after every update imaginable, I like the idea of getting back up quickly. I hate seeing the Apple update pop up and just know I'll have to reboot and interrupt whatever my process flow was at the time.
So I tend to push it off and forget about it. Rebooting is not terribly productive and definitely not a very optimized processes these days. Some times I wish I could gut more out of the OS X system to improve UI and do more general performance tweaks like in the old days of Mac OS. Anyone remember running OS 7/8/9 off a RAM disk? So fast... =)
I actually read TFA and I found it confirmed what I had already known for years. That the end user experience for a personal computer set up with the software designed for that particular architecture has not changed all that much in 20+ years.
Windows users PROBABLY got to see it more clearly, with the OS upgrades and hardware changes in that time span.
Now, I've read countless posts that say "Well MY specific experience doesn't fit in with this test. I need to use blah and blah, with blah and blah running, and it could never compare to an Old Mac." Or even better, "They should compare modern UNIX to that Old Mac... THAT would be a more accurate test for what they wanted to determine." Comments like these missed the whole point of the article. Most end users were not running UNIX, so any comparison with it is useless. Most end users were using their computer for simple office-like tasks. I've known for years that running a P166 with Win98, 32 MB ram and Office97 will produce about the same end user experience in loading times and program operation quality as a P4-3.3ghz with WinXP, 512 MB and OfficeXP. No, I'm not talking about the nifty features added to the Office suite in between those two releases. I'm talking about starting the computer and opening up a blank Word document to type a letter to Grandma or a resumé.
I would have liked to see mention of a comparison of both computers browsing sites hosted locally on the computers themselves, to compare the browsing experience itself, without the loading times of a 28.8 modem being compared to broadband in the same test. However, as sites have been upgraded to load in the same amount of time that they used to load (end user experience) over faster connections, there is just far too large of a difference in the amount of data being loaded between what you could comfortably browse with that old mac and what people are viewing on the web with XP/Firefox/IE or Vista/Firefox/IE. But to get the results they did, this was ultimately unnecessary to compare.
Just imagine, for the Majority of end users out there... how fast would their modern computers run, if they were using an older version of Windows and older versions of the popular programs they use daily? No, this example does not apply to the end of the spectrum users that are most likely responding on Slashdot. You know that you are not considered part of the majority of end users out there. Don't respond as if you are.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
I edited an Apple II user's zine, and we printed an article comparing similar things between an Apple IIe and a Mac Plus. The Apple won the more technical tests (nothing more technical than search-and-replace lots of times, though). The Mac people complained these tests were unfair due to an 8 bit processor vs. 16 bit with bit mapped video. Fewer bits takes fewer ops.
But our bottom line was the same: no difference in productivity. So, you can extend the conclusion here back another generation of machine.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That kind of user is really common: my mom, my boss, my son. These kinds of people do ONE thing and they do it a lot. And they would have been as happy on a computer 21 years ago as they are today.
That sucks, people! S-U-C-K-S! We've been 'improving' these things for a generation now and what did we gain? Nothing tangible to your basic user?
Let's add in my old Atari 130XE into the tests. Let's see...
Boot time: 1 second. OS in ROM.
Word Processor load: 1 second, unless you count the time it takes to insert the AtariWriter cartridge.
reboot time: 1 second.
And that's with 128*K* of memory! And it even has more colors than the Mac in the test! OMG! Atari has the fastest useable computer out there!!!!
I bet my Atari 2600 will load games faster than your Xbox 360 too!
What was the point of this article again?
My guess would on little speed differences is due to the Von Neumann architecture. In order to execute something you need to place the code and data in memory. Mac+ had to read only a small amount of data into it's tiny memory footprint, so of course it'll probably be about the same when the AMD machine is loading vastly more amounts of data each time it "starts" something. I'll take the AMD system any day of the week for productivity since it has the internet & networking. Without that most of my productivity would cease or come to a crawl. The internet and networking probably have added more to office productivity than any office app ever will. As for boot times effecting people productivity, I'm not sure of the logic here. People aren't 100% efficient at work...ever. I doubt 2 mins of boot up time will adversely effect a person's efficiency when the average worker wastes over an hour socializing and web-surfing. If you want shorter boot-up times, load less off the hard disk or use a ramdisk :P.
A MOD tune took up more than a little bandwidth and CPU time on 16-Bit Amigas, the ST OTOH had MIDI so you're right there. Now does that make the Atari ST > Amiga?
Bah -- the MacPlus won't run Myspace. Thus useless.
Heh, thanks. My brain's faded more in those 20 years than I thought :-)
you had me at #!
If I remember, I didn't get a hard drive at home or work until 1988 or '89.
Graphical UI, sure, but try running more than one program at a time on that Mac Plus. I'm a proud Apple user, but at least you can run Minesweeper AND Spider Solitaire at the same time on the competing Vista machine. Now, if you really want to see fast load times, my old Atari 800 would boot instantly, could hook up to my TV, and had NO FAN. Now THAT was a machine that stands the test of time (still boots, to boot!)
--
Franklin Brauner
Not to insult AMD, but why didnt you use the latest Intel Dual Core? Its much faster.
I have a mac book circa 2002 and you should compare it to the Mac plus.
My 2.8 GZ machine running Vista (a SLOW OS) smokes it and its not "dual core".
What would happen if you took Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 and loaded it on that puppy?
I think this is surely an interesting test but it is bordering on apples and oranges.
Neverless it is a fun topic.
There was a full-blown TCP stack on the Mac Plus. And it's not like they run in the background, either. Not sure what the original poster is trying to express.
How to make slow software:
main() {
init_foo();
init_bar();
init_baz();
init_zoo_system();
call_lots_of_other_inits();
init_a_few_other_things();
init_foo_a_second_time_by_accident();
read_200_conf_files_and_init_some_more();
finally_do_something();
}
Okay, here is the top-secret, patent-pending, method to write fast software. This technique was used once upon a time but seems to have been forgotten in the rush to make everything object-oriented. Tests show that this speeds up opening documents and applications many many times:
main() {
do_something();
}
foo() {
static bool beenhere = false;
if (!beenhere) {
beenhere = true;
init_foo();
}
do_foo();
}
Well that is exacly my user experience i started with a 8088 and i still wait for boot time open app wait till you can use it run defrag takes just as long. Perhaps i should go back to single thread dos programes now.
Heck, there are ways I wish the Mac UI was Platinum still. Aqua threw out the baby with the bathwater in some respects.
Constitutionally Correct
You also didn't have any sort of protetected memory back in 1986. The damn things would lock up on you and you'd have to reboot, often dozens of times per day. Crashing an application took down the whole system. It was often trivially easy to induce software crashes. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing at all could result in an app crashing. Memory leaks were quite common. When you did crash, anything you were working on was lost to the last time you saved, assuming it wasn't corrupted. Working around this often felt like that joke that starts out, "Doctor, it hurts whenever I do this!"
We made "working copies" of files in order to prevent this from causing the loss of important files that represented weeks or years of effort. Things like multiple Undo, Auto-save, and data recovery hadn't been invented or perfected yet.
You had to micromanage system resources, manually allocating how much RAM each application took, and when an app launched, it grabbed its full allocation at launch time whether it actually needed that much RAM or not. When it hit the limit you set for it, it couldn't go back to the system and get more; you'd have to Quit and manually bump up the allocation and hope that it was enough.
Font management on these systems was terrible. Font suitcase files disobeyed the normal rules for files, making it quite difficult to simply move them from one location to another. The font files often got corrupted from simple use, meaning you had to keep offline backups of all your fonts. If a critical system font went corrupt on you, good luck fixing the problem.
The hard drive was so tiny, you'd have to come up with really ingenious ways of compressing each and every last file to keep enough free space to do everything. This was back when CPU resources were so scarse that the cost of compressing and decompressing files was palpable (especially on single-tasking systems). You could spend an entire afternoon or day just screwing around with this stuff. Data compression could result in corruption, so if you were smart you kept offline backup copies of all your compressed data on floppies.
Speaking of hard drive problems, filesystem corruption was common, could render your system unbootable, and you needed to purchase a 3rd-party tool like Norton Disk Doctor just to do routine maintenance tasks like defragging and error checking/correction. On the plus side, these tools usually did work (although when they didn't they could cause you to lose data -- particularly defraggers). You always wanted to make backups of important files before you did anything involving the filesystem... which meant having stacks and stacks of floppy disks... which were really slow and required you to work with spanned compressed files. Fortunately floppy disks were made better back then.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is there's no way in hell I'd ever think about going back to using systems from that era. It's so painful to think about. Today's computers do so much more, so much better, it's not even funny. Speed and responsiveness isn't the only thing to think about when comparing between eras. Sure there's stuff now that's bloated beyond reason, features I never asked for or use, but I'd gladly live with that than have to go back to manually managing my OS's extensions load order (by carefully renaming the files so that they'd boot in correct alphabetical order, no less!) in order to produce a semblance of stability.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!