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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."
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.)
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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.
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.
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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
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.
"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
Who said anything about loading it into RAM? But the mere ability to support these things does increases the complexity of a program greatly, and thus increases resource usage.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
Not really, when it's a cost you pay once a day, which you can spend doing something other than staring at the machine.
Unless you you have a reboot in the middle of the day from a power outage, Update, System Crash, or you are just late and you need to get a file off your system which was powered down.
You don't need to reboot a machine to configure sendmail. And who has a job watching sendmail boot? This doesn't make any sense.
Unless you want to be sure it goes back up properly after bootup. Say you were altering the S99Sendmail file for different options and while you tested it and it workes fine without the reboot. When a reboot did happen (long power outage, Kernel Update, New hardware/Hardware failure) it fails to load properly because say you had it installed for the wrong init level. When configurating a system I like to prove that it will come back on in the state I want it to be in.
2 minutes, once or twice a month? I think that's negligible for a desktop machine.
It could also be Once a day to many times a day. Say you have a Nazi Security Adminsitratior who for the last couple of weeks has been perfecting his security policy and forces a reboot after every attempt. So 2 or 3 times a day gets annoying and waiting for it to reboot for a couple of minutes makes it worse.
If you ignore all the jobs you couldn't even do on the old system.
Yes but a lot of people/companies upgrade weither they need it or not. So they will get a new system and gain little, for most cases it will not be as big as a Mac Plus and a New PC 20 years later. But lets say from a Windows 98 System a P2 300Mhz to a Core 2 Duo 2.66 ghz running Vista (10 years (More or Less) difference). With Office 97 Upgraded to Office 2007... The bulk of the work you will do yesterday vs. today on the new system would be the same and substracting any learning curve your net productivity will be 0.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
~
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.