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."

Comments

Old stuff improves.

[0100010001010011]

Next articles to include:
Rubber tires vs wooden.
Model T vs 2011 Kia.
LEDs vs Candles.

Re:Old stuff improves.

[vawwyakr]

2011 Kia? How much of an improvement is that really over the Model T?

Re:Old stuff improves.

[tnk1]

2011 Kia? How much of an improvement is that really over the Model T?

More colors.

Slashdot: lame blog aggregator

[ari_j]

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?

Progress...

[C A S S I E L]

Users were allowed to program the Osborne - it had a built-in programming language interpreter. iPad? Verboten.

Re:Progress...

[jfengel]

The Osborne didn't have a built in anything. It had just enough BIOS to load a few K of operating system. That OS was written directly in Z80 assembly language. I don't remember if the assembler came with the OS or not; I don't think it did. I know that even C was an add-on I had to buy it, and I think the assembler came with it.

It did come with CBASIC and MBASIC. It's a bit hard to describe those as "built in" except that they came in the same box. They weren't really practical languages for serious work, though. (CBASIC was supposed to be, but it never worked very well.) We're talking REAL basic, with GOTOs and all, and GOSUB if you wanted to get all structured-programming. (Oh, and that M stands for Microsoft. Thank you, Bill Gates.)

It was "open" in more or less the same way a bag of resistors, capacitors, and transistors is open: you can roll anything at all you want. Just don't expect a lot of help.

Not really surprising

[Angst Badger]

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.

Re:Not really surprising

[LWATCDR]

Not exactly correct. Take wordstar for example and compare it to any modern program.
Fonts? Yea right you where lucky if the screen could display bold and italics.
Graphics? What?
Spell checker? It was a separate program you ran.

The good old days where not so go. Calcstar and Visicalc? Not bad but they are very limited to the dataset they can use. If you want Visicalc you can still run it on a new PC. It is really fast and very tiny.

Yes Wordstar could run in 64k. It could even handle very big docs but it did so by keeping them on disk. Do a search and replace on a large doc and you will learn patience. Yes it is so much nicer now to be a programmer. You can expect megabytes of free memory so you can put an entire document in memory at once and not worry about it. Customers do want to handle much larger datasets then they used to. Many graphical images are larger then the entire mass storage available on an a Micro from the 80s. Sound files are larger than the hard drives of the IBM XT and AT when they first shipped.
As someone that lived at the time and worked on those computers I can tell you that yes there where some great highly optimized programs back in the day. The thing is they where also feature limited. Today we are resource rich so we can put the effort into more features. With a good program every feature is there because someone wanted it or it solved a problem for the users.
Hey if you want to go back to the "good old days" you can grab the source to joe and add dot commands and printing.
Now I do agree with you in one area. Feature creep is a problem. Most people only use 10% of Microsoft Word or Excel. There are many times when I do wish that I could have a small fast spreadsheet or WordProcessor that loaded quickly and then went away just as quick. Mainly a spreadsheet. We are also missing Personal Information Managers. We have great databases but no really good tools for dealing with what I think of as list managers. Evernote isn't bad and frankly we are using universal search more and more to solve that issue.

Re:Most important difference

[fermion]

First, there is no reason why one cannot program an iPad. It costs $100. Freetards will complain, but there it is. I don't see how Apple can stop us from setting up Git with a whole slew of apps that we can personally share and compile and load on our personal machines. That this isn't happening is more an indication that people are more pissed off that they cannot download free cool apps than they are about not being able to code those cool apps. I happen to know kids that are programming because the iPhone has peaked their interest. They jailbreak the phone and program. Because they are doing something vaguely illegal, it makes it more exiting.

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.