Mac Plus beats AMD Dual Core PC

[PGTips]

Originally Posted by ElDiabloConCaca

are newer, more powerful computers REALLY more efficient if they can't really do human-style tasks any faster than they could 20 years ago?

Yes. They are. I can't speak about 20 years ago, as I wasn't using computers then.

- 15 years ago, I remember struggling with Word Star. We couldn't do images, had only 1 choice of font though with italic, underlined and bold variations. Internet? What's that? Multi-tasking? Whatever for? DOS does all I need.

- 10 years ago, I had Word 97. This was pretty good and it did most things I threw at it. Had a spell checker, grammar checker, handled images, had copy/paste from any application, pretty much the pinnacle of word processing. Successive versions of Word haven't been as ground breaking. Internet? Just a bunch of text slapped together with images and voilà, you've got your internet. Some tried to do rich content with Java Applets, but this was deemed way too slow. Interactivity on the Web is a pipe dream. We also view 1 page at a time, maybe 3 - 4 pages for those who know how to create a new IE/Netscape window.

- Present. Word is still the same. However, I get anti-aliased text!! Computers are now faster, so working with large Word documents is more bearable. Try opening a 300 page document with loads of images and cross-references (e.g. lcc-win32 programming manual, Thinking in C++/Java Word version). The Internet is full of rich media content. Not only that, we have tabbed browsing so it's common to have 10 - 15 tabs open at once. Multi tasking? I've got 5 apps running right now. TexShop, Safari, Azureus, Matlab, and Adium. All apps are running in the background as I type this and I feel no lag. I could not do this on a machine 15, 10 or even 5 years ago.

Where am I going with this? It's easy to point a finger and say bloat. Our demands and expectations grew with each new generation of CPU/OS. Most improvements that look trivial to the eye are actually very very compute intensive. One example is the move from 8 bit color displays to 16 bit. This was a dramatic move, from 256 colors to 65536 colors. The difference was as clear as night and day. Then came the move from 16 bits to 32 bit color. An improvement, but nowhere as drastic as the move from 8 to 16 bits. However, this small improvement comes at a huge cost. Memory overhead has gone up by 2x and processing overhead by 4x.

Replace 32 bit color with Unicode, protected memory kernels, multi-tasking kernels, 64 bit operating systems, etc. and you'll see your bloat. Do all these make you more productive? Hell yeah. Of course, you can engineer some contrived scenario where you can "prove" that a 15 year old machine outperforms a current machine. That reflects poorly on the the testing methodology not the hardware tested.

[Mikuro]

Of course you're right, PGTips. I think the author of the article would be the first to agree with you! You've just elaborated on his own admission that "the technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities."

The point is simply that old computers did the things they did just about as well as modern computers — and I, for one, think that's interesting. The article says nothing of the things modern computers do that old computers did not, except that they exist and are clearly significant. The only conclusion it makes is that "for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity". I'm tempted to argue with the word "majority", but I'm sure it's at least a significant amount.

The efficiency of simple tasks has been sacrificed to allow for the existence of more complex tasks. Does this make for a better user experience, more useful computers, or greater productivity? HELL YES.....unless, of course, you don't use those more complex tasks. Nothing can change the fact that efficiency for simple tasks has been sacrificed to a great degree, and people should consider whether they need those more complex tasks before falling for the old "bigger/newer is better" trap.

You'd be surprised how many businesses still use ASCII. In some cases it's actually required by law.

[PGTips]

One thing the author didn't address, is whether the Windows machine was using a virus scan, and what other applications/services were running in the background. This is highly significant, as the performance of the Find/Replace test does not make sense.

Anyway, I was happy with doing simple Word documents on my Pentium 233 MMX with 64 MB RAM in 1997. Wouldn't dream of working with the documents I have now on such a machine though.

edit: You English speakers are so lucky with ASCII . In many parts of the world, Unicode is a must and I for one am glad the new languages like C# and Java support Unicode by default instead of relying on C-style strings.

[Decade]

The Mac Plus can't be delayed by swapping. The CPU doesn't have the MMU needed to support swapping. For that matter, 4MB of RAM back then was fantastically expensive; 2.5MB was a much more realistic option at the time, possibly if your friend upgraded his Mac LC or something. For large documents, I think Word incrementally loads pieces into RAM as needed.

Also, the web browsers part is misleading. I've actually surfed the web on a Mac Plus. Pretty much the only browsers available are MacLynx (extremely poorly written for a Mac) and MacWeb. Neither supports anything like modern web standards.

Some of the "bloat" is intentional misuse of computing time for better user experience. Even on the Mac Plus, if you install System 7 (for the better connectedness and compatibility), you go to a menu, select something, and it wastes time flashing it, to provide visual feedback about what you've selected.

The connectedness is a really big deal. If you're a hermit novelist, and your manuscripts need no editing, I suppose you could be just as productive with a Mac Plus. Maybe more, because the old keyboards have really nice tactile feedback and durability. It should even work if you deal only with email, and aren't obligated to see those evil HTML emails as intended.

If you need frequent online collaboration while doing other things, you need the multitasking performance and security of a modern system. Even the IRC programs available for that old a machine are flaky and undesirable. Let alone the CPU and memory for IMs, voice chats, anything involving encryption, and anything involving pictures. The Mac Plus doesn't have Color QuickDraw, so that's more annoying than you'd expect.

The compatibility is not as big a deal, but it's worth noting that my media tasks can't be done on a Mac Plus; I work with 32-bit floating point samples at 44.1kHz, but the Mac Plus has a 4-voice 1-channel 8-bit sound unit at 22 kHz. The Mac Plus doesn't even have a FPU.

[ebykm]

I guess the purpose of this comparison is, surely we made better, cheaper, powerful, faster hardware, but our code suck. we never bothered to make faster, smaller, efficient code. The truth is, modern OS es and apps are bloatware . except those used in embedded systems, like QNX OS.

a qnx driver file is not larger than 50kb !!!, imagine that on windows / linux / os X, and it can do the classic system could do - GUI boot from a floppy and surf the net !!!. That is efficient code.

If we had smaller, faster code, the result would've been fatal for Mac Plus.

We salute the geniuse of Jeff Raskin whose super code made everything to fit on a floppy and leave a reasonable amount of memory for applications, till our developers start shipping OS es and apps based on smaller, efficient, faster code, that upgrading your OS/apps makes your computer faster. Amen.

[fryke]

Then again compared to the competition back then, the Macs had incredibly long boot times and wasted a *lot* of expensive memory on something called a "GUI". You had to lift your fingers from the keyboard in order to execute commands! Imagine!

[PGTips]

Originally Posted by ebykm

I guess the purpose of this comparison is, surely we made better, cheaper, powerful, faster hardware, but our code suck. we never bothered to make faster, smaller, efficient code. The truth is, modern OS es and apps are bloatware . except those used in embedded systems, like QNX OS.

I take great exception to this statement. Do you honestly think that when software developers get together, they discuss about how to make things bloated and inefficient? "Oh look, product A is doing way too well. Let's throw in a few wait/sleep statements in there and some superfluous loops."

There's an old saying in engineering that is very apt here. "Cheap, Fast, or Good: Pick two". The truth is, the most straightforward way of solving a problem isn't going to be the most efficient. A rudimentary demonstration of this is the problem of sorting. A bubble sort is the most straightforward sorting routine thinkable. It's easy to understand and thus easy to implement and debug. However, the bubble sort has the downside of being the most inefficient sorting algorithm on the planet. On the other hand, a quicksort is much harder to understand and as a consequent is much more difficult to maintain but it is an order of magnitude more efficient than the bubble sort. Efficiency and simplicity are often juxtaposed. Cheap, fast or good. Pick two.

There is a reason QNX is called an embedded operating system. It makes tradeoffs that a desktop operating system doesn't have to make.

[fryke]

Originally Posted by PGTips

I take great exception to this statement. Do you honestly think that when software developers get together, they discuss about how to make things bloated and inefficient? "Oh look, product A is doing way too well. Let's throw in a few wait/sleep statements in there and some superfluous loops."

Nope (although I'm not addressed directly). But it goes down like this:

1.) Our product is doing well.
2.) We must release a new version to make more money.
3.) We need new features and new ways to accomplish the same things.
4.) We need bullet-points on the packaging.
5.) Okay, now, we need this in a couple of weeks, since we've already announced that a great new version would be out shortly. There's rumours online about the product doing all of it in 3D and that it has a new UI as well. Can someone slap on a skin or something?

I.e.: These things don't start with engineering. These things start in marketing.