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Pitting a Mac Plus Against an AMD Dual Core
Journal written by Alien54 (180860) and posted by
kdawson
on Thu May 31, 2007 11:44 AM
from the computing-through-the-ages dept.
from the computing-through-the-ages dept.
In the Age of Computer Bloat someone has decided to do a performance comparison between a 1986 Mac Plus and a 2007 AMD Dual core, each running appropriate software. Computer Bloat does not fare so well. "In order to keep the hoots and hollers of 'unfair comparison' at a minimum, we designed the tests to be as fair and equitable as possible. We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience... And no, we didn't include processing-heavy modern software like Photoshop or Crysis! We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications."
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Tiny midget wizard. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tiny midget wizard. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Developer motivation (Score:5, Interesting)
I cannot really agree with these tests that just compare "start up tasks" like opening a file or booting the OS. There often is a good reason not to focus too much on these events, because don't happen that often. Responsiveness during use is a better comparison, and this is much harder. Modern machines do a lot of things in the background, like running full blown TCP/IP stacks, something the Mac Plus could not have done. And while opening a file 0.2 seconds faster will not really improve my productivity by much, having instant access to Google and Wikipedia does.
But anyway: Here is a quote from Andy Hertzfeld [wikipedia.org] about how Steve Jobs [wikipedia.org] motivated them to make the Mac boot faster (taken from the documentary The triumph of the nerds [imdb.com] by Robert X. Cringley [wikipedia.org].)
Re:Developer motivation (Score:5, Insightful)
Similarly, if an app takes a long time to save a document, and it blocks the user from doing other things during this process, that's pretty obnoxious. Most people save frequently (or at least they should), and if it takes longer than a second or two at most, you've just interrupted their workflow.
UI responsiveness is definitely king, I'm firmly with you there, but speed in other areas shouldn't just be written off. Applications and system software needs to be designed to do what the user wants, while getting in the way as little as possible. Sometimes I think that gets forgotten by developers, from time to time.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Let's start with the admission that the modern OS is 15 thousand times larger (1MB versus 15GB). It's a fair assumption that most applications are at least larger by a small fraction of that - say one thousand times larger.
That old SCSI hard disk would have a peak read speed of around 1MB/s, while the best disks around today are approaching 10
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot really agree with these tests that just compare "start up tasks" like opening a file or booting the OS. There often is a good reason not to focus too much on these events, because don't happen that often.
I have no idea what the hell your talking about, I open hundreds of files a day on average, and very likely thousands, any programmer working on a large project opens countless files all day long.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
TCP/IP is not exactly a complicated set of protocols. Ancient machines can and did easily handle it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Developer motivation (Score:5, Funny)
Based on this post, I believe that you must use a Mac, and are just defending the poor 1986 mac.
You don't open files often, so you're not a Linux user. Those guys open files like crazy, all the time. Like, everything is a file to them, and then they open it.
You don't reboot often, so you're obviously not a Windows user.
Please be clear and reveal your personal biases in such important benchmark test discussions.
Parent
Re:Developer motivation (Score:5, Funny)
so, clearly, I cannot choose the cup in front of you.
so, clearly, I cannot choose the cup in front of me.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Developer motivation (Score:5, Insightful)
The writers know about the issue you are talking about and believe that all the crap that they have a modern computer load is NOT neccessary.
Me personally, I know that EVERYTIME I install software, no matter how rarely I wish to use it, I have to check and remove all this GARBAGE that they put into my start up. You gave a list of things such as scanners, DVD burners. I use those rarely.
For 99 out of 100 people there is NO good reason to put those things in the startup. Those are great examples, proving my point. It makes far more sense to 'start' those processes once a month when you actually use them instead of taking 1 second every single day.
If you personally use them every day instead of 1/month, then fine YOU can put them in your startup. Wasting my time (and worse, using vile, hard to understand names making it dificult to realize what your PC is doing and therefore hard/dangerous to remove) placing all that CRAPWARE into startup is obnoxious, rude, and bad business
Parent
Also (Score:4, Informative)
However as you said, it doesn't really matter as the computers are performing on totally different levels. In every way a new system does more than a Mac Plus. Even if you dismiss the usefulness of multi-tasking and look at just the app there's huge improvements. One would be the in-line spell checker. As I'm sure this post is revealing I'm a horrible speller. However in Word it is great, it will check spelling as I go along. After a few times of correcting the same mistake, it just starts auto correcting. It gets to the point where once I've trained a copy I can type a document and it is good to go as it has fixed all the problems.
This is just another example of the great Benjamin Disraeli quote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Or in other words, you can twist around a test in almost any way you like to make it come out with a result that you want. However that doesn't mean that it has any relevance.
Parent
Re:Developer motivation (Score:5, Funny)
then getting people to ditch their computers completely is like curing cancer and AIDS.
Parent
Re:Developer motivation (Score:5, Interesting)
A/UX booted in about 90 seconds on a Mac Quadra 950. 33MHz 68040. As far as I can tell, it had most of the functionality of Mac OS X today - albeit without the slick visual effects and more modern GUI.
Parent
Spoiler Warning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Spoiler Warning (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I would find my words per minute would not vary. The legibility of the document would be identical. I could even say that the typewriter is superior in some ways - for instance, my document autosaves on every keystroke.
Calling features "bloat" strikes me the same as when a person will call a reason an "excuse". There are times and places when "bloat" and "excuses" are valid words, but they can be inserted where they are invalid just as easily.
Perhaps the law of diminishing returns holds true. After all, a typewriter really is all one needs to write a novel, and in fact I do not think a computer helps one write a novel thousands of times more quickly. However, there are features (spell check, formatting, fonts, predictive text, voice recognition...) that enhance the writing experience.
I guess I just don't get the point of this article.
Re:Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor. (Score:4, Insightful)
A disabled person may find themselves with inferior production tools, and that is what the current state of the art gives them if they use voice recognition compared to someone using typing. Meanwhile, for the 99.999+% of the human race with fully functioning fingers, they'll do better to learn to type properly.
"I have no substantive arguments on the subject so I'll try to invoke guilt of the plight of the less fortunate or guilt of racism because needs of ethnic group x wasn't addressed".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor. (Score:5, Insightful)
I once reviewed a preliminary copy of a text by Jef Raskin, one of the Mac designers. It was double-spaced Courier, with hand-drawn diagrams. I found that ironic, coming from him, but it made sense. There were professionals to make the drawings look nice and format the text. His job was the words and the gist of the diagrams.
Nonetheless, it was typed on a computer. (It's easy to spot typewritten text; it will always have some typos or irregular letters). I'm sure it's because it let him rearrange sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters without having to re-type from scratch, and it's no harder than typing. The diagrams, however, are still more work than hand-drawing. (At least, I know of no tool that's as easy, even with a drawing tablet.)
Some writers prefer the notion of organizing everything in your head before typing anything, but that's more memory than I've got. I relied on the ability of the word processor so I could start a paragraph and come back to it later without having to change the paper in my typewriter a huge time boost.
Despite what I've just said, I concur that the article is mostly silly. Others are making that point as well as I can. I just wanted to show why I thought a computer was much better than a typewriter, for different reasons than you gave.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Years ago when I worked for a large law firm, I never ceased to be amazed how the "old timers" (partners who grew up in the days when things like secretarial pools existed) could and regularly would dictate the
word processor productivity kills typewriter. (Score:3, Interesting)
Only a person who's never had to use a typewriter could think of it the way they think of a word processor. People dedicated their lives to typing and made careers out of doing it well. The average person gave their hand written manuscripts to secretaries who typed them, if and only if it had to be published. Word processing is much faster, if you have reasonable software. This is why people spent thousands of dollars on computers that did little more than spell check and print.
The authors fairly compa
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also nice how everything that the Mac Plus (and old machines in general) sucked at or couldn't do were left out. Making such a big deal out of startup time seems pretty pointless too.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the Mac Plus and the WinXP Pro SP2 systems were the most widely used GUI based desktop machines at their respective time, thus making a comparison about productivity feasible.
Parent
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes everyting the Mac Plus couldn't do was left out. Also they didn't run the normal benchmark software as well. Knowing quite well the new system will eat its lunch. Also they are using different versions of software. But the point of the test was comparing the quality of life for people with the Mac Pro back in the 80s vs. the Quality of Life today with people with PCs today, doing the same jobs.
Bootup Speet is important espectially back in the 80's where people turned off their computers when they were done, and people still do that today. So bootup time is quite useful in measuring productivity. In Linux if you misconfigure say sendmail in Red Hat when you boot up you are waiting for minutes for it to load and fail. Making Linux Boot time painfully slow. This effects productivity (say your job is to insure Sendmail works properly at bootup). For windows reboots are frequent when you have updates so you are working on you job and you get an automatic update you need to reboot and wait 2 minutes when you get everything back you need to refresh were you left off.
The point of the article is that as computers get faster the software get proportionally slower so you tend to get a 0 net gain in productivity in the common jobs you do on your system now.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless you you have a reboot in the middle of the day from a power outage, Update, System Crash, or you are just late and you need to get a file off your system which was powered down.
You don't need to reboot a machine to configure sendmail. And who has a job watching sendmail boot? This doesn't make any sense.
Unless you want to be sure it goes back up properly after bootup. Say you were a
zero advance in productivity my a** (Score:2)
The Maytag of Computers (Score:3, Interesting)
Finding a contemporary IBM PC to do the same performance test would be more appropriate and interesting, but connectivity and functionality there (it was built years before Windows) would be a big challenge under the non-graphical DOS, if not impossible. I don't know if there's even a Linux out there that could understand that old PC technology. I'm sure it could be done--I just wouldn't want to be the one to try.
1986 software at least felt deterministic (Score:5, Interesting)
Operations that took a long time (such as reflowing a page in a desktop publishing program) at least appeared deterministic - you knew it would take a second or two to reflow, so you weren't anxiously waiting for the system to do something.
Slashdotted! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes yes yes (Score:2)
glad someone did this comparison... (Score:5, Interesting)
I digress. The point is - nothing seems much better in the user experience than before, for the vast majority of things we do - and that includes MacOS X, to my thinking. Nothing that makes me jump up and down and twist and shout anyway. What apps have I added in the last 10 years? Music players. Video players. Browsers. Pretty much it. I wonder where the hell my 4.5 billion clock cycles a second are actually going.
I don't know - computing just doesn't seem very exciting anymore. Help.
sloth jr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, except for multi-tasking. You don't use that at all, right? Multifinder was only introduced in System 6, long after the Mac Plus was made obsolete by newer Macs.
Look, I liked my Mac Plus. I even liked the 512k, except for bumping against memory limits in large documents. But you're really viewing this whole thing with rose-colored glasses if y
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Improved USER experience almost always comes from new software/features, rather than improvements to old software/features. The new features are where your clock cycles go. It's where they've always gone.
Word isn't opening any faster twenty years on. But it is spell-/grammar-checking the document, importing multimedia, rendering a cleartype font, looking for online colla
Comparison to AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and browsing the web plays no part in the modern user experience. None at all. Don't even think about it. If most people weren't doing it in '86, it's not important.
Which is why I like vi... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting to see that the machines have gotten faster, software more complex, etc., etc., but software like vim just keeps on truckin'. Too bad we don't have more software like this.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Me, I use emacs. It was sluggish back then, and it's still sluggish now :) (At least, the startup time is a little annoying).
Bah (Score:3, Funny)
The Anthropic Principle (Score:5, Insightful)
Boiling frogs (Score:4, Insightful)
"Market acceptable" is a measurement that is not static.
Let's look at the convention wisdom on boiling frogs. Supposedly, if you put them in boiling water they will hop right out - but if you put them in a vat of cold water, they will stay in the pot as you progressively heat it to boiling.
The computer industry has been boiling frogs (where we are all the frogs) for twenty years or so, where the next generation of computers are just a little slower with each iteration. It's not much slower, and offers a bit more, so people accept it - and along with it a new definition of "market acceptable".
So it's not like this article is not raising some really valid points.
Parent
First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Compared to an Amiga, everything is bloated and slow.
... and when do I get fast copper on my PC? Hmm?
I knew it.. (Score:3, Funny)
Then one day Bill Gates found Steve's copy of the "Workbench 3.1 Users Guide" sitting in the Delorean, and hijacked it traveling back in time to give his younger self a copy, and therefore, the keys to a multi-billion dollar future of corrupt monopolies.
Old PC's w/old OS's can fly..... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an aging Win98-era Pentium II@350 Mhz with 392 megs of RAM, and running Win98, it simply flies.... I keep it around to run some era programs I like, and every time I power it up, I am simply stunned all over again at how blazingly fast it responds. It responds to user input and opens regular programs noticeably faster than the few computers I've bought since--computers that have faster drives, much faster CPU's and way more RAM.
Of course Win98 has a number of problems now--a lot of vulnerabilities and no antivirus I know of still supports it, so getting online is walking in a minefield. And even used for local apps it needs to be rebooted every 4-6 hours to be safe... but even then, warm-rebooting only takes like 20 fucking seconds, and that's just the usual OS install, no optimization ever undertaken. Did we used to bitch about bootup times? Have they gotten longer or shorter?
For a whlie I had Mandrake on it too, but Mandrake ran like a dog. With Linux and WinXP there's all this fucking-about with the hard drive that has to occur, for some reason..... any time you do something, even with the hard drives spinning, these bigger/better OS's seemto have to go off and piss away a couple seconds before actually doing anything.
All your boxen belong to bloat.
~
Time (not processing) is the constant (Score:3, Insightful)
For "interactive" tasks it usually isn't, and for a good reason.
No one cares if a program takes 1.4 seconds to complete a find & replace instead of 0.8 seconds. No one cares if a program takes 5.4 seconds to start instead of 3.9. If it took 20, then yes, people probably would care. You see, for interactive tasks, time is the fixed value. Specifically, the time that people don't mind waiting (which varies depending on how common that task is, of course).
This article just proves Murphy's laws of computation: data expands to fill all available space, processing expands to fill all available time, etc..
It's the same thing with games. I could probably take a game from 1995 and run it at 400 fps on my modern hardware. But if I can run a much better-looking version at 60 or even 30 fps, I'll probably pick that one instead. If it ran at 5 fps, I would rather play the old one.
There is a point beyond which "more features" (or "prettier graphics" or whatever) is worth more than an increase in "reaction speed".
That is why CPU-intensive tasks (the ones that never feel "fast enough") are the right way to test hardware; because they tell you how fast the thing can run, and not how fast the developers decided it should run to avoid annoying the user while appealing to as many people as possible (by including extra features).
The article's conclusion that there is "zero advance in productivity" is meaningless. Even if we take one of the most common operations (find & replace), does anyone really believe that, if it completed 1 second faster, people would be noticeably "more productive"...? In this kind of task, "productivity" depends 99% on the human part of the system.
They might call it Computer Bloat... (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee. I guess I don't call that bloat at all. I call it multi-tasking. Let's see a computer from 1986 do that.
So let me get this straight. Someone's complaining that a computer today can do all of this but that dialog boxes pop up a little slower? Then go back to using your '86 Mac. I'm quite happy with what I have today, thank you.
TLF
Re: (Score:3, Informative)