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Osborne 1 vs. IPad 2
On Saturday we ran a story about the 30th Anniversary of the Osborne Computer, and today we have an amusing head-to-head: Osborne 1 vs the iPad 2.
StormDriver starts: "At first, they seem to belong in completely different weight categories. Osborne 1 is just under 11 kg, enough to pull your arm out of the socket, if you're a skinny geek. That's roughly 20 times more than an iPad, or about the same as whole suitcase of them But what about the processing power? Osbourne 1 was sporting a Z80 CPU, running at a stunning frequency of 4.0 MHz. You cannot compare the different architectures directly, but iPad's CPU is a dual core A5, clocked at up to 1 GHz. That's approximately three hundred times more, not counting in the vastly superior architecture. Z80 CPU was supported by whooping 64KB of system memory. Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software. Today's iPad is equipped with 512MB of RAM (roughly one thousand times more), and some reviewers complain it's a bit on the low side."
Next articles to include:
Rubber tires vs wooden.
Model T vs 2011 Kia.
LEDs vs Candles.
The size of say, the spreadsheet program's binary files on both machines and ask yourself exactly how many of those "features" you actually use.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The Osborne 1 was an amazing machine, but the Osborne 2 was going to be even more amazing. Since it never got a chance to be released, comparing a second generation iPad to the Oz1 seems a bit unfair.
What about apples and oranges? These have never been fairly compared.
Software (including operating systems - perhaps especially operating systems) is so bloated nowadays that it makes this type of comparison completely ridiculous. It affects both the memory footprint as well as the execution speed, not to mention the sloppy programming practices and security holes.
512MB is a lot more than 1000x 64KB.
8,000 times more.
Leaving to the side the content of the story itself, this is just another blog that someone has succeeded in getting free advertising for thanks to Slashdot's willingness to post retarded crap. But the most annoying part is that the blogger is illiterate. There's a difference between whooping and whopping, for instance. He also sucks at math, as others have pointed out. If Slashdot is going to feed the world other people's blogs all day, can we at least get some that are well-written about topics of interest to nerds over the age of 5?
"Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software." Surprising to ignorant trekkie pedophile geeks, maybe. Real jocks know how to make more with less. Faced with difficulties and low on resources, we push through an win. Nerds whine, complain they don't have the "right equipment" and sulk in a corner. Until we beat them up and shit on their faces.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
My RAM is usually quiet, didn't realize old systems had such excited memory.
As far as poorly written submissions go, this is one of the worst I've seen in a long time.
Users were allowed to program the Osborne - it had a built-in programming language interpreter. iPad? Verboten.
the iPad still can't fit into your pocket.
Please seek immediate mental health care. Then we can work on spelling and coherence.
When I used an Osborne people would come up and say "Wow Whats That!", if you have an Ipad they just say "Oh an Ipad"
With the Osborne 1, people got introduced to the world of programming and were able to actually learn and produce something.
With the iPad 2, people can post on Facebook what they did eat for breakfast (does Jobs still allows posting on Facebook, doesn't he?)
...not trolling, either.
Why?
- Real, physical keyboard ...and so on. Osborne 1 is much more suited for geekery.
- Easy access to the filesystem
- The ability to install whatever you want, and use the computer however you want
- Tons of languages, dev tools, and compilers (were) available for various languages
- I/O ports for useful tasks like printing
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Z80 CPU was supported by whooping 64KB of system memory.
Was it celebrating something? Or did it have case of pertussis, the poor thing?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Just how much of an improvement is a keyboard, mouse, and display over Hollerith Cards?
The transmission involved multiple foot pedals and a lever. The throttle on the model T is also a lever.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software. Today's iPad is equipped with 512MB of RAM (roughly one thousand times more), and some reviewers complain it's a bit on the low side.
This is not surprising at all. The general trend over the intervening three decades has been to trade efficiency for development time. The result is applications that are often less responsive than their primitive predecessors which were written in hand-coded assembly language. Moreover, because most users -- especially corporate users -- only upgrade their software when they replace their machines, often when a new package has increased hardware demands, there's a feedback effect between hardware and software vendors, with less efficient resource hogging software driving hardware sales which in turn drives the sales of new licenses for established software. As application categories mature -- when was the last time you saw a new word processor or spreadsheet feature worth paying for an upgrade? -- this becomes the only driver of substantial new sales.
Software has to get worse for both industries to maintain their desired growth rates. And because technical users ceased to be the majority of users decades ago, the industry has largely managed to get away with it. I had hoped FOSS software would have reversed this trend since FOSS is largely free of market pressures, but the Free Software folks could never sully themselves by making end-user-friendly software, and the Open Source folks were bent on imitating the very corporations they despised. Ergo, you can have Microsoft Office hog your resources or have OpenOffice.org hog your resources or you can use emacs or vim to write your documents in LaTeX. The user gets screwed either way, profits continue as normal for Intel, Apple, and Microsoft, and FOSS remains a minor player in userspace.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
To think that something much better might have made it to slashdots frontpage and yet we got this....
And yet the Osborne is still a better machine as I can run the software I want on it, and not the software Steve Jobs tells me to run.
I wonder if in 30 years we'll be looking back at the iPad 2 and wondering how we managed to do anything with something so slow, restricted and clunky. And what will we be comparing it to? Back in my day we had touchscreens, none of this neural implant junk...
dual core GHZ arm only 300 times faster than 4MHz Z80? I don't think so. z80 is rougly 0.2 Mips. dual core GHZ arm is roughly 2000 mips. not to mention those are 32 bit mips instead of 8 bit mips.
at least Ozzy has an original style.
given that performance should double every two year;
so with 15 2 years periods we get a growth factor,
g = 2^15 = 32,768
That is some Crazy Train of a list you have there. At 11 kg, you'd have to be a real Iron Man to lift the old tablet. What about the safety of the Apple battery? If it catches fire, you could have an Electric Funeral without having the opportunity to tell your family, See You On the Other Side.
I remember the 'good ole days' when programmers wrote lean mean code BECAUSE you only had 64k of ram to use total. Yes, back in the day, there were word processors, spreadsheets (I recall one that shipped on a single 360k floppy disc), and pretty much all the basic office functions you'd want - and they ran reasonably fast. As resources became more plentiful, programmers got SLOPPY. I look at code today and cringe - such waste. I'm still coding like I have 64k, and am happy to say, my programs run like greased lightning. I think ALL PROGRAMMERS should be forced to code exclusively on 64k Ram machines for a year before they are called 'programmers' to be perfectly honest. It would cure a great deal of ugly code bloat that is so rampant today.
-JurassiC++
But at least you could load whatever you wanted on the Osborne 1
I think this is more a commentary on the poor state of many programs today. Back when the Osborne was on the market, programmers had to get the most out of every byte of memory and every cycle of the CPU. Now, nobody cares about efficiency, we just put it on a faster bigger computer and throw away the "obsolete" computer. Yes, this also happened "way back when" but paying a thousand or more on a computer made people think twice before upgrading.
Which of the two is more useful for mission critical work. Say, Osborne had a real keyboard and support for removable storage media.
I worked for Oasis Systems/FTL Games back in the early 1980s; we had software than ran on the Osborne 1 ("The Word Plus" spelling checker; "Punctuation + Style" grammar checker). In fact, if I remember correctly, we used a utility package running on the Osborne 1 to create most of our other 5.25" CP/M disk formats; there was no standard 5.25" disk format for CP/M, and so we had to create different disks for most different computers running CP/M.
Adam Osborne was actually a columnist for InfoWorld who, after complaining about the state of the personal computing market, decided to take action and start his own computer company. The Osborne 1 was a success (within the scope of the tiny nascent PC market at the time), but he pre-announced the Osborne II too far in advance of being able to ship it, saw his Osborne 1 sales dry up, and ended up having to shut down the company due to lack of cash flow. If you've ever heard anyone refer to "the Osborne effect", that's what they're talking about.
Not much nostalgia here, though -- I'll take my modern laptops, desktops, and digital devices (iPhone 4, iPad 1) over an Osborne any day. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software
I fail to see what the surprise is... So it ran software that was designed and written for it? Wow, surprise!
iPad's are just expensive frisbee's
It's like the mind going AWOL, it's there somewhere
In his June 4, 1984 "Inside Track" column in Infoworld (p.95), John C Dvorak wrote this:
"Apparently there is an advertisement in one of the munitions magazines that goes something like this:
"The Guy on the Right Doesn't Stand a Chance. The guy on the right has the Osborne 1, a fully functional computer system in a portable package the size of a briefcase. The guy on the left has an Uzi submachine gun concealed in his attache case. Also in the case are four fully loaded, 32-round clips of 125-grain 9mm ammunition.
"The owner of the Uzi is going to get more tactical firepower delivered - and delivered on target - in less time, and with less effort.
"All for $795. It's inevitable.
"If you're going up against some guy with an Osborne 1 - or any personal computer - he's the one who's in trouble. One round from an Uzi can zip through ten inches of solid pine wood, so you can imagine what it will do to structural foam acrylic and sheet aluminum. In fact, detachable magazines for the Uzi are available in 32-, 32-, and 40-round capacities, so you can take out an entire office full of Apple II or IBM Personal Computers tied into Ethernet or other local-area networks.
"What about the new 16-bit computers, like the Lisa and Fortune? Even with Winchester backup, they're no match for the Uzi. One quick burst and they'll find out what Unix means.
"Make your commanding officer proud. Get an Uzi - and come home a winner in te fight for office automatic weapons."
This was written 27-years ago, before deranged individuals with firearms shifted this from ironic humor into tragedy. But at the time it was very very funny.
There are stronger tablets. if you used them, the "wow see how much mobility improved" effect the article is going for would be much more.
again, why ipad.
Read radical news here
warning in advance. pedantic/anal reply. motorsports background, so can't let it slide, sorry
anyone comparing Apple products to those of exclusive car makers with very limited production runs such as Bugatti clearly has no idea about anything cars. you'd get away with a comparison to BMW or Audi, or even Mercedes or Porsche (well-polished products, all of which are produced in much high quantities), all of which have enough ponies under the hood to make the point. the 1870 Strassenwagen reference is apt tho XD
on the flipside, i am not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination (despite writing this on a MBP), but comparing Apple to Kia is too low even in my books
Did they compare battery life? Oh wait.
Seriously, I think the Model 100 would be a more interesting comparison. (FYI, battery life on a Model 100 was about 20 hours on 4xAA alkalines.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"64K is enough" all you ./ers owe Steve "Bigger Douche than John Edward" Jobs an apology for mocking him for this enlightened wisdom!
So I can get a Mac + development license for $100?
..whopping 64KB
..4MHz
Sure, for those of you out there who weren't around to own and program computers with an 8-bit processor like a Z80, it sounds like a joke, but back in the day these were the cutting-edge of computing technology, and businesses and scientists and engineers used them just like modern machines are used today, except without most of the bells and whistles. Why is 512MB considered unacceptably small now? Because the software we write is utterly bloated. Back in the day, you generally didn't write serious software in BASIC, but today we have entire professional-level software suites written in Visual BASIC -- and believe me, the first time I heard that, I practically fell out of my chair, I was laughing so hard. In the days when 8-bit processors were king, assembly language was ubiquitous; C was the new kid on the block, really, unless you lived in the world of UNIX, and BASIC was something that kids used to get their feet wet with programming. There were no graphics to speak of, not until later on, everything was text, and with tight memory constraints you learned to code as small and efficiently as possible. Today, when 4GB of memory (not counting virtual memory space, naturally) is commonplace and cheap, and a 1GHz processor is now something you find in your phone or in a toy, you can get away with being sloppy and wasteful and still get the job done.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The Osborne 1 was a Wookiee?
my 30 years old Osborne can CRUSH your ipad2, and will barely have a scratch...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
The grammar in that article is making my eyes bleed... and not in a good way.
Both Osborne and Apple Computer started up at the same Home Brew Computer club.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I have an Osborne 1. It comes with, among other things, CBASIC and MBASIC. These are both things that would not be allowed in the iTunes store for ideological reasons, because they are code interpreters.
REM INFINITE LOOP
10 ? "OSBORNE RULES"
20 IF $IPAD $OSBORNE GOTO 10
30 END
The Osborne was designed with the assumption that it's purchasers would be intelligent enough to read a couple manuals and learn some basic skills. It offered even greater power to those who went beyond the basics.
The iPad assumes you are an idiot who can't be expected to learn a damn thing. Heck, you probably can't even be bothered to touch things with your finger unless they are shiny and smooth. Master the complexity of touching things? Great, but unlike learning the basics of the Orborne, it won't help you actually understand anything about how the system works. The interface is so far abstracted from the machine that you won't ever learn anything by using it.
Products that cater to the ignorant may find marketing success, but ultimately they do our society a massive disservice.
-Lod
Back in 1985 I learned Lisp on the Osborne 1. I had to pay for the software! And, it took about 2 weeks just to find a version of Lisp that would run on the Osborne 1. Those were the days!
http://hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins
4MHz -> 1GHz is approximately 300 times? well, only as much as 250 is approximately 300 :) Ridiculous comparison, though, given the massive difference in architecture. I'd be curious to see a benchmark of anything computational, because an 8bit CPU has to work far harder. I suspect the multiplier would be at least two orders of magnitude higher.
64K -> 512M is approximately 1000 times? Er, no - try 10 000 times :)
Methinks the summary writer's calculator must be broken, and his/her numeracy is questionable...
64 K to 512 MB is 8192 times more not 1000 times more. 4 MHz to 1 GHz is 250 times more not 300 times more. Please consult a calculator before spouting off mathematical comparisons.
Posting only because the rest of your text was very good.
It's "piqued," related to "piquant." One uses "piquant" in reference to food mainly, but "piqued" almost exclusively relates to something having stimulated the mind (both negatively and positively, but there are subtle differences again, your interest is piqued (stimulated), but you may simultaneously feel piqued (irritated) by this post.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
512MB / 64KB = 8192
yes, programmers knew how to make efficient use of resources back then!
... it won't help you actually understand anything about how the system works.
The vast majority of people do not want to learn how the system works. Only nerds want to do that. The vast majority of people want to use a computer and maybe they want to use it to learn something else (e.g. a spoken language), but when you make that task more complicated by having them learn how the system works, they are put off.
There was a time when the vast majority of people didn't want to read. Only priests needed to be literate. The vast majority of people just wanted to do what they were told to do, according to the holy texts, which they could not read themselves.
-Lod
The vast majority of people are not auto mechanics or brain surgeons either. For most people their computing device is a tool, not a hobby.
In what way would your vision of how computers should be make the world a better place..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imV3pPIUy1k
Douglas Rushoff says it much better than I ever could. His book on this topic is very interesting, and highly recommended if you are interested in the subject.
-Lod
but you can't run Farmville on the Osborne, so it's useless.