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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.
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?
Users were allowed to program the Osborne - it had a built-in programming language interpreter. iPad? Verboten.
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
Indeed, it's 2^13 (8192) times more.
And the RAM in the Osbourne 1 was probably eight 8KB chips, whereas (IIRC) it's two 256MB dies in the iPad 2, on the same chip as the CPU and GPU and more.
But in the end magnitudes are all that matter when the differences are so massive. A Z80 took between 4 and 11 clock cycles to perform an instruction (8 or 16 bits typically) - let's say 0.1 MIPS/clock, whereas a 1GHz ARM A9 can do 2.5 MIPS/clock. That's 25 times more instructions per clock, and 250 times the clock, and twice the cores, and then we have to consider the ARM is 32-bit - so you need even more instructions on the Z80 for 32-bit operations. It's probably not too far off 20,000x faster to compute something on the integer cores of the A5 than on the Osbourne's Z80 - and that's before we consider the Neon vector units, the dedicate hardware for security, graphics, video, ...
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.
Didn't you get the twitter? Whooping is the new rad. Next time you see a hawt girl be sure to tell her how Ebola she looks*
*Void where prohibited. I am not responsible for any slaps or STDs or babies that may occur from using such phrases.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
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.
He didn't say 0.1 million instructions per clock, he said 0.1 million instructions per second per clock. On a 1GHz processor, this means that it will be 10^14 MIPS faster every second.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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; }
The grammar in that article is making my eyes bleed... and not in a good way.
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