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Osborne 1 vs. IPad 2

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the there-actually-is-only-one dept.

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."

3 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot: lame blog aggregator by ari_j · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Progress... by C+A+S+S+I+E+L · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Progress... by jfengel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.