Pitting a Mac Plus Against an AMD Dual Core

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."

Tiny midget wizard.

[spun]

He likes ice cream. Spoon it right into the "cup holder" and he might grant you a wish!

Re:Tiny midget wizard.

[spun]

Oh I don't care. Someone saw it, and laughed, that's all I care about.

Developer motivation

[chriss]

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].)

Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot to boot up when you first turned it on so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him well you know how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to be millions of people and let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well that's five seconds times a million every day that's fifty lifetimes, if you can shave five seconds off that you're saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster.

Re:Developer motivation

[Kadin2048]

I admit the boot-time figure isn't anything to obsess too hard about, but things like application-launch times certainly are. How quickly an application launches adds a lot to how often I use it and how reluctant I am to open it. If I know that launching it is going to take a minute or two (like Photoshop used to on my old PowerMac), I'm not going to click that sucker without a damn good reason. In fact I'm probably going to find some other tool to do the job, if I have a lot of quick tasks to accomplish.

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.

Re:

[joggle]

I agree, launch time for an app is important. I'm glad that Vista now loads apps you use often into memory when the OS loads. So now when I load the apps I use every day it happens nearly instantaneously (except for modern games, they still tend to take a while to load it seems).

Re:

[default luser]

The launch time is a test the modern computer is guaranteed to lose. This is because the peak read rate of hard disks has only improved by 100x in the last 20 years.

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:

[l4m3z0r]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Oh really? [wikipedia.org]

TCP/IP is not exactly a complicated set of protocols. Ancient machines can and did easily handle it.

Re:

[encoderer]

Well, to be pedantic, ancient machines were running Trans-Cave Protocol / Abacus Protocol. TCP/AP proved wildly successful. It's affects on the economy were downright chiseling.

Re:Developer motivation

[griffjon]

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.

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.

Re:Developer motivation

[tyme]

griffjon wrote:

You don't open files often, so you're not a Linux user.

so, clearly, I cannot choose the cup in front of you.

You don't reboot often, so you're obviously not a Windows user.

so, clearly, I cannot choose the cup in front of me.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Agreed. How many things does your typical modern Linux PC, Windows PC or Macintosh actually start at bootup time compared with a Mac Plus from 20 years ago? TCP/IP stacks are just the tip of the iceberg. How about file indexing daemons like Beagle, USB hotplug support, an OpenSSH server, device drivers and other such suport for hundreds of modern pieces of hardware like scanners, DVD burners, etc., and hundreds of other things that actually enhance my productivity on a day-to-day basis, yet we seem to ta

Re:Developer motivation

[gurps_npc]

You misunderstand the point. Basically, the author is saying what you describe is a BAD BAD IDEA.

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

Re:

[stevesliva]

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.

Speaking of, how do I get the damn iPodService.exe and iTunesHelper.exe programs to go away for good? Can't find anything within iTunes.

Re:

[phasm42]

Don't know for sure, but to start, you could try going to Control Panel: Administrative Tools: Services, and stopping the iPod service and setting it to Disabled.

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

It ignores other factors such as relative price. Of course the server is apparently being run on a Mac plus so I can't go back and check the article to see if they listed the specs of the current PC, but a Mac Plus cost about $2500 when it was introduced. Now, take $2500 in 1986 dollars and you get about $4500 in today's dollars. Well, $4500 buys you a shitload of computer. You can get a much better processor than they had, 4GB of RAM, a hardware RAID controller with a bunch of disks and so on. Load up something like that and see what your launch times are like. Given that the system they are using probably is less than $2000 in today's dollars, you aren't even close money wise.

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.

Re:

[RebelWebmaster]

As I'm sure this post is revealing I'm a horrible speller.

Firefox has built-in spell checking, you know ;-)

Re:

[Sycraft-fu]

It works for shit. Yes it can identify what is spelled incorrectly, however it doesn't seem to be able to tell me how to fix it. I use the Google Toolbar instead which, while not as good as Office, works well enough. However the inline auto-correction is something I would really like to see.

Re:

[phasm42]

Why is parent modded troll? Price is a valid area to ask for equality in the comparison.

Re:Developer motivation

[digitalderbs]

if you can shave five seconds off that you're saving fifty lives

then getting people to ditch their computers completely is like curing cancer and AIDS.

TCP/IP stack, Thar she Blows!

[twitter]

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.

Yeah, I think that "blown TCP/IP" is a M$ thing [slashdot.org]. Mac plus can run a TCP/IP stack, I've seen a website run from a Lisa2 [macdailynews.com].

DSL, feather and 40 MB GNU/Linux live CDs make it all look bloated. The nifty thing about free software is that you can still run the older less bloated versions on new hardware and there are whole distributions tuned to do just that with improvemen

Re:Developer motivation

[vought]

I wonder how well a modern UNIX would compare to the old Mac

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.

Re:

[Trillan]

Well, Mac OS X took 52 seconds on my PowerBook G4 from power button press to fully responsive (when set to auto-login). Almost half of that was diagnostics.

Re:

[vought]

even with all the modern glitz of nicer guis, how would Linux or what have you compare?

Far more functionality, far more complexity, and far more bloat. And far more fun. :-)

Re:

[Original Replica]

I'm going to make a comparison to a Ford Model T and a Space Shuttle

Don't forget to include the "which one would be more useful for common people to own and use" tests. Hmmm. Which one can I use to go get groceries? Which one can I use to take the kids to school? How many people a year really need to go into space?

Sometimes all the extra horsepower and fanciness don't make it much more useful. Maybe if modern software more resembled a limosine or a Prius or a Lambrogini than the space shuttle in that c

Spoiler Warning

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

*** the webserver lost

Re:Spoiler Warning

[missing000]

But is it running on a Mac+ or AMD?

Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor.

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

As with this article, what really would that prove?

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.

[rubycodez]

actually, you're half right on the features: spell checking, formatting and fonts are useful and can be done with the 20+ year old software as well as the new (and faster on the old). But to anyone who types at a reasonable rate, predictive text is a huge annoyance (and often causes wrong values to be input into fields and just slows the typing of documents. Good typists turn that crap off, it IS bloat. Voice recognition is much slower and much less accurate than typing, I wouldn't even consider using it to create a document. But bloat and gee-whizz panders to the "hunt and peck" crowd.

Re:Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor.

[phasm42]

spell checking, formatting and fonts are useful and can be done with the 20+ year old software as well as the new (and faster on the old).

What if you need to work in Swedish and Japanese documents? Oh wait, only English matters.

But to anyone who types at a reasonable rate, predictive text is a huge annoyance (and often causes wrong values to be input into fields and just slows the typing of documents. Good typists turn that crap off, it IS bloat. Voice recognition is much slower and much less accurate than typing, I wouldn't even consider using it to create a document.

I guess disabled people shouldn't be using computers then?

Re:Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor.

[rubycodez]

There in fact were computerized solutions 20+ years ago for writing documents with Scandinavian characters and Japanese pictographs/romanizations that are less bloated than today's.

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".

Re:

[phasm42]

What you don't seem to understand is that merely adding the capability of turning on a feature like multi-language spell check, or voice recognition, or alternate input methods, or right-to-left typing, or alternate input methods, etc, increases the complexity (and resource usage) of software, regardless of whether _you_ use them or not.

Re:

[rubycodez]

not in well designed software: dynamic libraries and modules/drivers don't have to be loaded nor even installed to hard disk. That software is largely not well designed these days is the point.

Re:

[senatorpjt]

The last time I used it, even dasher [cam.ac.uk] was faster than voice recognition.

Re:

[phasm42]

Who said anything about loading it into RAM? But the mere ability to support these things does increases the complexity of a program greatly, and thus increases resource usage.

Re:Lets compare a typewriter to a word processor.

[jfengel]

Having written a few books myself, I can say that the biggest advantage of a computer over a typewriter is the ability to correct and reorganize.

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.

Re:

[value_added]

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.

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

Maybe read the whole article?

[LoaTao]

"Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the "User Experience" has not changed much in two decades.' The point they are trying to make is that while hardware has advanced considerably and software has added capability the actually base user interface and thus user experience has not changed much in 20 years. The authors don't go into the "wh

Re:

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Ok, I agree on this point. I guess the lack of UI experience is really the point of the article.

But what really more can be done with the 2D GUI (and by '2D' I mean 'displayed on a 2D monitor' even if we are talking about 3D objects)?

I just posted a reply comparing GUI to the written word. Basically there is only so far you can go with a particular medium. We are stuck in a evolutionary chain of improvement in regards to UI - I feel that a revolutionary technological method for interfacing with a computer m

word processor productivity kills typewriter.

[twitter]

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?

[phasm42]

Why didn't he compare the Mac Plus against an OS X machine, or the XP machine against a DOS 6 machine?

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?

[chriss]

Why didn't he compare the Mac Plus against an OS X machine, or the XP machine against a DOS 6 machine?

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.

Re:

[phasm42]

Although a GUI can aid in productivity, you don't need a GUI to be productive. Besides, DOS had ASCII based GUIs. Also, although the author claims to be comparing productivity, he's not. To compare productivity, you need to compare tasks, not feature X in each of these two programs.

Re:Huh?

[jellomizer]

Well the Mac Plus was a GUI system at the time so it is a closer match for comparing Windows XP then DOS 6 is. As well many of the tests used would be unfair with OS X for Intel. Excel and Word for mac are still Power PC version so they need to run via Rosetta which will slow down the resusults running XP will actually have a better performance for the Test.

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.

Re:

[phasm42]

So bootup time is quite useful in measuring productivity.

Not really, when it's a cost you pay once a day, which you can spend doing something other than staring at the machine.

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)

You don't need to reboot a machine to configure sendmail. And who has a job watching

Re:

[jellomizer]

Not really, when it's a cost you pay once a day, which you can spend doing something other than staring at the machine.
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

Re:

[phasm42]

Unless you you have a reboot in the middle of the day from a power outage, Update, System Crash

Make that twice a day on a bad day then. Still negligible.

or you are just late and you need to get a file off your system which was powered down.

Well, you're out of luck there if you can't wait a couple minutes. But once I do, I can do more than put it on a floppy (if it'll even fit). I could put it on an external hard drive, a thumb drive, a CD or DVD, or put it on a shared network drive or email it. The Mac Pl

Re:

[MBGMorden]

Making such a big deal out of startup time seems pretty pointless too.

If you knew how often I had to restart mine you wouldn't dismiss it that quickly. I've got an old Mac Classic that won't stay on for more than 15 minutes without locking up :).

Re:

[jellomizer]

Arn't those Microsoft adds. Windows X is are best version of Windows yet. Compared to our old version our new version is so much better.

zero advance in productivity my a**

[Joe The Dragon]

having a bigger screen is big boost and the old mac may have a hard time driving one with an external dongle

Re:

[phasm42]

He also drags out the biggest CRT he can find and complains about its weight instead of just using an LCD like everyone does in 2007.

The Maytag of Computers

[Spencerian]

The Mac Plus (of which I was a former owner) is a quintessential example of Apple's past design principles in terms of quality (recent examples such as the Macbooks, which I also own, are having nasty hardware and QC issues). The fact that you can get this old Mac to speak "internet" and continue to run (it has only a SCSI-25 interface for drives and other peripherals) is a testament to good design, whether you're an Apple fan or not.

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.

Re:

[the_humeister]

The Mac Plus [apple-history.com] was introduced in 1986. Most x86 computers back then were a magnitude more expandable in comparison. 8088/86 and 80286 processors were fairly common back then. And yes, you can put these old machines up on the internet using Windows 3.x. So I don't see what the big deal is.

1986 software at least felt deterministic

[ribuck]

Software from 1986 didn't have scalable fonts, 32-bit colour, etc, but the interface was usually snappy. Menus dropped down snappily, and dialog boxes opened immediately, for example.

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.

Re:

[DrSkwid]

Menus are bloat. You don't even need them. [bell-labs.com]

Slashdotted!

[rueger]

Guess we've established that the Mac Plus was not the best choice for hosting the web site?

Yes yes yes

[Sciros]

I have without delay submitted a tech request for a 1986 Mac Plus. I expect to soon be the envy of all the other developers, who will remain stuck with their kickas^H^H^H pointless workstations.

glad someone did this comparison...

[sloth jr]

I've been troubled for years on how generational improvements in computation equipment don't seem to result in improved USER experience. Now, important to realize that in the comparisons selected, we're talking about 1-bit bit-mapped operations on a screen 512x368 in size (from memory - might have botched the Y coord limit). Might be interesting to see what happens on that PC when dropping the display to 640x480 and 256 colors. That'd be a little closer to apples-apples comparison.

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:

[jellomizer]

Well I am sure it will be faster if you match defaults of the previous tech. Lowering your screen resolution, Heck if I could install OS 6 nativly on my Intel Mac I bet it would run with near 0 wait for most of the features. The point is that we are not gaining a productivity gain (in what we had before) as technology increases because as technology improves the software complexity matches and gives us some new features or new tools that make the experience better but not more productive.

Re:

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

What really is that different about your car of today and one from the 50s?

Both eras have similar horsepower; gas mileage is better by far today, though by ratio adjusting for gas prices I think the cost per mile is still comparable; leather seats....what really is so much better about the cars of today?

How about words? Writing hasn't changed for thousands of years. We still use characters to represent things.

I think the truly big breakthroughs in user experience will occur with better voice commands and op

Re:

[Erwos]

"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."

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:

[0123456]

"Might be interesting to see what happens on that PC when dropping the display to 640x480 and 256 colors."

Last time I tried running in 256-color mode, it was slower than 32-bit. And a modern PC graphics card can fill the screen thousands of times a second even at high resolution, so dropping to 640x480 won't help much.

It's the bloated OS and apps that slow us down, not the graphics.

Re:

[forkazoo]

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.

To be fair, there were a lot of projects that tried to create some really new stuff. In part

Re:

[*weasel]

I've been troubled for years on how generational improvements in computation equipment don't seem to result in improved USER experience.

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

[phasm42]

The constant blather about comparing it to "AMD" really speaks volumes about the author. Apparently AMD determines your user experience on a modern PC running XP.

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...

[wandazulu]

I used vi on a VT100 attached to a vax running BSD back in 1990 and I use vi (vim) today on a MacBook Pro that could handle more simultaneous users than the vax did. It was always fast to start then, and it's fast to start today, though now I have colors, split windows, and a bajillion other features I struggle to remember.

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:

[spyrochaete]

I love applications featuring multiple ways to execute a command. GUI is a must these days, but I admire software like Gmail and Firefox for featuring vi-style shortcuts that ride silently on the GUI. Geeks can do their jobs that much quicker, but noobs get by just fine with grope and click.

Re:

[timeOday]

I used vi on a VT100 attached to a vax running BSD back in 1990 and I use vi (vim) today on a MacBook Pro that could handle more simultaneous users than the vax did. It was always fast to start then, and it's fast to start today

How the heck did that get modded flaimbait?

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

[Stickerboy]

Only the AMD dual core can run Clippy while you go about your work, that's the only thing that matters in my book...

For a fair historical comparison...

[__aaclcg7560]

They should compare a Mac+, AMD Dual Core and a Commodore 64 when playing Pong.

So You Want To Be Productive?

[mrjb]

Then try running a Mac Plus *emulator* on modern hardware. I'd like to know how it measures up against the Real Thing, but I'd be surprised if it won't outrun the Real Thing by a factor gazillion.

If you measure productivity by response times, run software that is more responsive. Your hardware gives you that choice. Ever tried running Windows 3.1 on a 200 MHz pentium? It really *flies*.

Oh, and by the way- for fair comparison, also run a dual core emulator on the Mac Plus. I guess we have advanced after all.

The Anthropic Principle

[briglass]

The anthropic principle helps to explain why this comparison makes no sense. By virtue of the fact that both computers are market-ready and market-tested machines (especially in the highly successful Mac Plus), their usability speeds MUST be under or around market-acceptable levels. Otherwise, they would either not have survived alpha and beta testing or not have survived as a marketable product. What this comparison is really tapping into is the user-acceptable speed level, which has not changed since the 1980s (because humans haven't changed much).

Boiling frogs

[SuperKendall]

...their usability speeds MUST be under or around market-acceptable levels...

"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.

Re:

[Prien715]

By analogy, that would mean there ought to be televisions around that are black and white since the market found those acceptable too. And many systems should still be using atari-like graphics (Atari was a huge hit, market accepted that too).

I think the major point the author is making is that, if asked, we'd believe our productivity to be improved because of the newer technology in these basic operations, but it's not (or so he claims). We just don't see Apple+s any more so we have no standards for comp

First Post!

[Timesprout]

I submitted this from my 1985 Amiga to proved that even a 1986 Mac is bloated and slow.

Re:

[the_greywolf]

Compared to an Amiga, everything is bloated and slow.

... and when do I get fast copper on my PC? Hmm?

I knew it..

[GreggBz]

This is proof positive that Steve Jobs traveled to the alternate future in the Dolorean Woz invented to subsequently steal all his technology from the Amiga intergalactic headquarters on Lunar Base Lorannie.

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.

Pointless comparison

[edwardpickman]

I do graphics and the older machines might as well have come with a handcrank. Also older Macs were slow by any standard.

Things like start up are silly to compare because they have far more to do with system configuration than processor power. I had an old Via 600 machine that could start most apps in seconds but was rediculously slow. Traditional benchmarks are the standard for a reason. In some ways rendering has only increased marginally over the years but that is because demand has gone up dramaticall

No web browsing? Who are they kidding

[Paul Carver]

I don't see how I can take seriously any comparison of "typical computer use" that excludes web browsing. They claim "zero advance in productivity" but completely overlook the fact that "productivity" is probably just a small fraction of overall computer use.

If you exclude web browsing, online gaming, recreational photo editing, music recording, video editing, etc. then you're probably excluding 50-90% of modern computer use.

So yes, for the couple of percent of people whose needs were completely satisfied b

Why No Change?

[Gallenod]

Response time is important. To most users, the interface is 99.9% of the system; they don't care what's under the hood.

Here's a question that might be worth considering: Have computer OS makers kept the response of computers relatively constant by accident or design? We've gotten used to working a a particular pace that, at least according to this article, hasn't changed significantly in 20 years. Once you accept that pace as the norm, you either don't think to try to change it or avoid changing it so yo

Obvious

[xero314]

thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

The summary of the article is really all you need to read to realize that computer advancements are not about make people more productive. The number of hors worked and the amount of free time enjoyed by people has not changed since the introduction of the Integrated Circuit. The number of useful advancements has not increased and the average cost of products has not decreased.

I still run a large number of applications in emulators because the older software was faster per clock cycle than current soft

Flood Fill Test.

[jellomizer]

Both OS's have a drawing tool like Mac Counterpart of MS Paint and say Photoshop on windows for simular tasks. I bet working with that tool set will show some improvements on the AMD. I remember Flood Fills on Older Computers being quite slow, I use to draw stick men and put my mouse on the bottom of the screen to do a flood fille to animate Lava flowing up, or the stick man has a Gun and I make lines in the background and click on the flood fill so it looks like they are shooting a gun at them in slow mo

Old PC's w/old OS's can fly.....

[Slugster]

This result (what I can glean from comments, as the site is being pounded) doesn't surprise me.

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. .... I have (single-CPU) WinXP machines (haven't stepped up to any dual-cores yet, but I wonder what good it'll do), have run a couple GUI-distros of Linux on them over the years and have seen Apples at work--and nothing new I've yet seen is as fast as that clunker 98 box is, running 98. :|

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.
~

As others are pointing out ...

[tomstdenis]

A lot of those "frills" are taken for granted in the user experience. My OS seems to have a similar response to a 1986 Mac ... all while running many tasks at once including media players, file servers, etc, etc, etc.

I want to see that 16MHz 68000 decode an MP3 in realtime [or faster] and have CPU to spare to do anything else.

ugh

[hurfy]

I know all i need to know about that subject :(

I found it takes a 2GHz w/HT or better windows box to emulate a dumb terminal without a noticable lag because of AV/firewall in the background :/ Otherwise the remote terminals 400 miles away is faster than mine 25ft away from server. The old box running like a 1.4Ghz P4 and win98 with AV/firewall feels just like the old remote terminals on a 1200 baud line :O

Oh, and why can't my 2.4GHz XP box keep up with my 386 in a DOS database program? An extra couple billi

For Real

[not_hylas( )]

I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb]
(Valley Girl) O-M-G !!!
ALL the women want me.
I AM leet.

Seriously, it runs a [small :-] server ... offline:

http://www.machttp.org/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6 [machttp.org]

Like others:

http://www.ld8.org/servers/servers.html [ld8.org]

It's 21 years old for Christ's sake. My Wife has a PowerMac 2x 2,5 MHz G5 and it *feels* snappier than that.
The point is BIGGER MHz EVEN BIGGER bloat, we've gained so little.
The constant "arms race" of MHz to bloat

Re:

[Dr. Manhattan]

I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb] ... Seriously, it runs a [small :-] server ... offline:

I've got a Mac SE/30... online [homeunix.org]. Sure, it can't handle a full Slashdotting, but people clicking in via the comments on Slashdot never made it break a sweat.

But if you want l33t, see the Lisa servers [ld8.org]. Those guys get the chicks.

Compiling a small program on my dual 2GHz Athlon... 0.6 seconds. Compiling the same program on the SE/30... over seven minutes. :->

Time (not processing) is the constant

[Rui del-Negro]

The real issue here is not if an "AMD system" is faster than a "Mac". For that, they would have to test exactly the same software, not different versions of it. The issue is if modern software, running on modern hardware, is faster than old software, running on old hardware.

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...

[The Living Fractal]

I call it being able to surf Wikipedia, Google, and Slashdot in a tabbed browser while running a program like Seti@home in the background with Winamp, Excel, Word and Outlook all readily available at the touch of a button (alt-tab) through mapped servers that centrally store my work. (let's not forget WoW running windowed in the background so I can watch my auctions). Oh, I probably shouldn't leave out the firewalls, the AV software, the synchronization/connection with my PDA, the EPO client, the dual 21" LCDs driven at 1600x1200 EACH, and the fact that all of it pops up on my screen within a second if I want it.

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:

[Drizzt Do'Urden]

Exactly! And I believe it was the point of the tests!

They didn't only test start-time operations, but scrolling through word files, counting words, etc! Thing is, how come a Dual-2.4Ghz Athlon can't count words in a Word document faster than a 8Mhz M68000?

Is there really must-have features for your work that Word3 didn't have?

We have to agree, though, that this consumerism made the computer market evolve really quickly.

Re:

[phasm42]

Thing is, how come a Dual-2.4Ghz Athlon can't count words in a Word document faster than a 8Mhz M68000?

If you read the article, it does count words faster. And according to his "benchmark", the Mac Plus was twice as laggy when typing (I use scare quotes because of the poor quality of the article, even results that favor the XP machine are suspect).

Re:

[Drizzt Do'Urden]

Yes, but not 300 times faster!

In fact, I saw an article [lapresseaffaires.com] that showed that, on the PC side, Excel never got any speed gain in years. It was like having you old Pentium 90Mhz for some tasks.

In fact, if you look that the benchmarks, a Pentium 4 1.5Ghz is about the same speed as a PowerPC 603e 100Mhz in the floating point numbers (column "Décimaux") due to a bug in the mathlib of Excel..

This means that, when old code is forgotten and built onto, switching machines might not make you work faster ;)

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Once benchmark was copy and paste, which wasn't supported in linux until 2004.

Uhhhh....what? Copy and paste has been supported on Linux since the day it could run XFree86. Probably sometime back in the early 90s.

Re:

[Duncan3]

No, it wasn't. Linux developers spent all their time fighting about how cut&paste should work with a dozen different ways of doing it, up until about 2004 :)

Don't worry, they are still fighting over a huge number of other things that just piss everyone off and make developers have to target each distribution separately.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

You're talking about *rich* cut and paste. The OP was talking about cut and paste. Still works today. Highlight the text, point in the new text input area, click the middle button. Done.

Re:

[senatorpjt]

well, gpm supported text-mode cut and paste. And, you're just talking about *mouse* cut and paste. just regular keyboard cut/paste was supported in vi.

Of course he meant rich, since it was a comparison between the mac and windows.

I'm surprised they didn't try old versions of Word, or DOS.

Re:

[nagora]

"The lower the level of the code language, the less processing cycles are required to get something done."

The majority of slashdot readers should be raising their nose at the scent of bullshit from this comment.

And the majority would be wrong. Assembler beats C every time by a large margin for both size and speed. What C/C++ etc beat assembler on is speed of development and, sometimes, ease of maintenance.

There is a popular myth that current compilers can equal a good assembly-language programmer fro q

Re:

[GreggBz]

Oh that is bullshit. Mac OS had the majority of it's interface parts written in Pascal. The lower level stuff was written mostly in assembly. Further, modern compilers would certainly get the C (Maybe C++) that WinXP is written in, pretty darn close performance wise to pure assembly. And it was easy to use assembly when the platforms were all homogeneous. The notion that you could even write OS as complex and compatible as Win XP in pure assembly is preposterous.

Re:

[laffer1]

This is the most insightful post I've seen on this topic. What we really need is usability testing. I'd like to see usability testing comparing Vista, XP Pro, Mac OS 10.4, Mac OS 9, Linux or BSD running several popular desktop environments, Solaris, OPENSTEP, and OS/2 Warp 4. Solaris would provide an older style gnome desktop environment with openoffice and a browser. Then give the testers a series of tasks to complete like the following:

1. Go to a few websites. www.google.com, www.cnn.com, ...
2. Check

Re:

[kosmosik]

> I've been thinking about this for quite a while -- why hasn't anyone
> brought out an OS that's designed for modern hardware, but has nothing
> but speed in mind.

They did. In numerous of ways. It is just that consumers (meaning desktop users) don't want such stuff. Average Joe needs something that is easy (or tends to be) to use. Not assembler shell on raw iron. :)

> I mean -- I want a GUI and all, but nothing slower than fluxbox.
> Isn't there a niche for shipping an OS that wrings every last