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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.
...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.
The Osbourne 1 was a cool machines, but mostly I saw it used for writing and the like. It was an affordable machine that seemed more 'bushiness like' than the Apple ][, which, frankly, did more than the Osbourne. Applesoft Basic allowed us to do way more cool stuff than the Osborne machine, and in many ways was more portable.
In terms of transportable machines, the company went bankrupt because it did so little. Besides the Mac being a much more portable and powerful machine 4 years after the Osburne 1 was introduced, there were also other competitors on it's tail. The Tandy 200 certainly had all the critical features, costs less, and was way more portable. I got huge amounts on work done on that machine.
In terms of inexpensive on the go programming, the casio/sharp/tandy pocket computers were the way to go. They had a rudimentary basic language. I recall writing an program to solve matrixes, compute simple physics equations and the like. Of course now if a program is not a game the it isn't programming, but back then we were happy if a we could program a computer to do our homework.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black