*http://hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins said:The Most Outlandish Computer Comparison Ever!
Bloat. If you think that Americans are getting fatter, take one good look at the operating system (OS) your computer is running right now. It gets larger and more weighed down with every update. We are in the third decade of global personal computing, and have we really progressed that far?
Let's go back to the dawn of personal computing and grab an old sentimental favorite, the Apple Macintosh Plus. The Mac Plus is an icon of the '80s along with padded shoulders, big hair and Devo. It seems that we all had a little Mac, either in our college dorm room, in the upstairs bedroom, or on our office desk at some time. With its tiny 9-inch black & white screen and all-in-one packaging, the Mac Plus is a computing relic in the days of widescreen LCD monitors and dual- and quad-core systems.
However, to run these state-of-the-art PCs, we need to install one of the latest OSs. And that's where we run into trouble. Most people today have either Windows XP or Vista on their PCs. These OSs are modern, possess virtually infinite capacities and can run any of the most modern software. With the greater functionality comes size.
The Comparison
The generally recommended configuration for a Mac Plus is System 6.0.8. This is an OS that needs a legitimate minimum of 1 megabyte of RAM to be able to multitask, connect to a network, print, display WYSIWYG in millions of colours (on modular Macs), as well as run a reasonable GUI. Those are functions that usually require at least 500 times more memory under Windows XP and 1,000 times more memory under Windows Vista.
When we look at OS hard disk requirements, we find similar discrepancies. System 6.0.8 requires 1MB, Windows XP requires 1.5GB and Windows Vista 15GB. Yes, Vista needs 15,000 times the hard disk space as System 6.0.8. In simple text format, you can write 175,000 words in one megabyte which is the size of System 6.0.8. That works out to about two full-length novels. Windows Vista demands enough real estate on your hard drive that you could easily fit 30,000 full-length novels into it.
System 6.0.8 is not only a lot more compact since it has far fewer (mostly useless) features and therefore less code to process, but also because it was written in assembly code instead of the higher level language C. The lower the level of the code language, the less processing cycles are required to get something done.
The Mac Plus has a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 8MHz. The AMD has an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with two cores, each running at 2.4GHz. In absolute computing power exclusively measured in processor speed, AMD's combined 4.8GHz is 600 times faster than the Motorola. However, the AMD is a far more advanced processor, thus performs in conventional benchmarks much faster than the old 68000 per Mhz. So it's very safe to say that the AMD is at least 1,000 times faster than the Mac Plus.
We decided to splurge and fit the maximum possible 4MB RAM into the old Plus. After all it was going up against AMD with its 2x512MB RAM for a total of 1,024MB or 1GB. That's about 250 times more memory than the Mac.
The Mac was fitted with an external SCSI 40MB Hard Drive. The AMD had an internal IDE 120GB Hard Drive with a 3,000 times greater data capacity. Both drives were under 10% filled.
The Tests
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. There was no point running PCMark or Sandra Sisoft-type benchmarks on the two computers as the AMD would have the Mac for lunch. We focussed on running tests that reflect how the user perceives the computing experience. After all, most users don't know or care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core CPU or a tiny midget wizard squatting in their cases. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it does the tasks we most often ask it to do. 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.
Since the tests involve both different computers and different versions of software, it was important to design the tests to have as much consistency as possible.
1) Test timings were performed by a single person.
2) All of the tests were performed on the latest and most effective OS configuration. For the Mac Plus, that was System 6.0.8. For the AMD that was Windows XP Professional SP2.
3) All of the tests were performed with a generally recommended amount of RAM for the OS configuration. For the Mac Plus, that was 4MB. For the AMD that was 1GB.
4) All of the tests were done on original spec systems, therefore the hard disks were freshly formatted, the OSs just installed and no third party software beyond the standard Apple and Microsoft installations.
5) All of the tests were performed with only that single application open. Nothing but background and OS tasks that are part of a standard install of either OSs were running. The computers were not connected to the Internet or a LAN.
6) All of the tests were measured to within 0.1 second.
7) Each tests was performed at least three times per test per machine and the times averaged out.
The tests themselves went off flawlessly. Neither computer crashed or misbehaved in any way. They just did what they were asked, regardless of the technolgical advancements (or lack thereof) inside the case.
We didn't try any Web Surfing since the only browsers that are supposed to work well on the Mac Plus are Mozilla 1.2.1, Mozilla 1.3.1 and early versions of WannaBe and iCab. We thought that surfing the net on a b&w 9 screen would be a bit of a bummer, so we skipped it. However, there are some die-hard enthusiasts that are doing just that!
Then again there were various ways, including the Power R Video Driver Cable and various external dongles, which would let you connect all sorts of large external monitors to the Mac Plus. I remember lugging huge 80 lb. Ikegami 24 b&w monitors up and down stairs as they were the preferred screens for the later compact Macs like the SEs an SE/30s of publishing art departments around 1990. The photo of the monitor here is of a Hitachi 21 which was the biggest one I could find. Just picture that the Ikegamis were much bigger even than this monster! I guess that's why I still have a bad back!
We ran a variety of tests on two major software applications. The AMD got Word and Excel from Microsoft Office 2007. The Mac Plus got Word 3.01 and Excel 1.5. Yes, we know that these software versions were released one and two years respectively after the 1986 Mac Plus. But we just couldn't bring ourselves to run the earlier and hopelessly buggy versions.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is the single software application most often used by people around the world. The tests that hold the greatest relevance to everyday office and personal use of Word are the most basic ones: Application Launch, Find & Replace, Open File, Pasting, Saving, Scrolling, Typing and Word Count.
Microsoft Excel
With Excel, we concentrated again on the most repetitive and common tasks. We chose: Application Launch, Arrange Windows, Autoformat, Fill Range, In-Cell Editing, Scroll Vertical, Subtotals and Zoom Out. Most users use relatively small spreadsheets so we used a 640 filled-cell format.
Time To Boot
Just for fun, we thought we'd throw in a Boot timing as well, just to see how long the OS takes from the time the button is pushed until the desktop is ready to use.
Conclusion
Check out the results! For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable.
We also didn't want to overly embarrass the AMD by comparing the time it takes to install the OS vs. the old Mac. The Mac's average of about a minute is dwarfed by the approximately one hour install time of Windows XP Pro.
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. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don't even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, 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.
And that's just plain crazy.
Mac Plus beats AMD Dual Core PC
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Qion
Uber Nothing
I'll have to try this with my Mac Classic vs. my Vista gaming machine. I don't doubt that the Classic is more responsive in some aspects... Vista is a piece of bloatware, even for the dual-core, 2GB RAM, 250GB hard drive Acer I have.
I would love it if Apple were to announce in a few months that Leopard will boot from RAM due to massive, system-wide code simplification.
I would love it if Apple were to announce in a few months that Leopard will boot from RAM due to massive, system-wide code simplification.
Mikuro
Crotchety UI Nitpicker
Do you mean in place of the PC, or in place of the Mac Plus?
I have to admit, I was surprised by some of this. It's no shock to me that the software of 10-30 years ago was vastly more efficient. Not only is that apparent in everyday use, but it's also only logical: As we get more processing power, a lot of that is used to make software easier to develop, not faster. And that's probably a good thing. We probably wouldn't have most of the software we all use today if programming were still as hard as it was in the 80s. High-level tools make for slower apps, but they drastically decrease development time. (As "web apps" catch on, software efficiency is taking yet another a huge nosedive.)
But....word count? Find/replace? Subtotal? I would not have expected those tests to even be close, and yet the Mac Plus was faster at some! That's surprising. I wonder how a more efficiency-oriented modern program (e.g., BBEdit) would compare to MS Word then and now. I mean, it's no secret that MS Word is one of the most bloated products on the market.
Lt Major Burns
"Dicky" Charlteston-Burns
feeeeaature creeeeep....
Mikuro
Crotchety UI Nitpicker
This made me curious to see how some of the simple apps I use stack up to each other. I took a 1.5MB text file and replaced a string that occurred about 4100 times. The rough results:
TextWrangler: ~14 seconds
BBEdit Lite: ~2 seconds
NeoOffice: ~4 seconds
TextEdit: <0.5 seconds
Wow. I need to start using TextEdit more. And TextWrangler less. I knew it was slower than its predecessor (BBEdit Lite) but I didn't realize it was that much slower. I never would have expected NeoOffice to beat it out, let alone by such a margin.
TextWrangler: ~14 seconds
BBEdit Lite: ~2 seconds
NeoOffice: ~4 seconds
TextEdit: <0.5 seconds
Wow. I need to start using TextEdit more. And TextWrangler less. I knew it was slower than its predecessor (BBEdit Lite) but I didn't realize it was that much slower. I never would have expected NeoOffice to beat it out, let alone by such a margin.
This is a ridiculous comparison. But I guess whatever makes headlines these days is fair game. Just a couple of things to note:
1) What was the size of the Word file? Contain anything other than text? It is most likely smaller than 4 MB as a larger file will cause the system page in/out to virtual memory resulting in horrendously poor performance.
2) Unicode? Thought not.
The list could go on ... Pity they didn't dare to try browsing the web. With the current slew of rich content websites, the old Mac isn't going to cut it. Sure, it will work if all you're doing is simple HTML pages, but that's about it.
I hate comparisons like this. Macs are good as they are. Why resort to silly/pointless comparisons like this to demonstrate it?
1) What was the size of the Word file? Contain anything other than text? It is most likely smaller than 4 MB as a larger file will cause the system page in/out to virtual memory resulting in horrendously poor performance.
2) Unicode? Thought not.
The list could go on ... Pity they didn't dare to try browsing the web. With the current slew of rich content websites, the old Mac isn't going to cut it. Sure, it will work if all you're doing is simple HTML pages, but that's about it.
I hate comparisons like this. Macs are good as they are. Why resort to silly/pointless comparisons like this to demonstrate it?
ElDiabloConCaca
U.S.D.A. Prime
I doubt the comparison was made between those two computers to demonstrate the superiority of the Mac platform; rather, I think it was intended to show that, regardless of operating system or platform, even though computers have evolved with many hundreds of times more computing power, the time it takes to do the same tasks hasn't decreased -- hence: 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
Crotchety UI Nitpicker
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Qion
Uber Nothing
Yes, yes, we're all cynical. That aside, I think Fryke is completely right. Marketing often has more hold on what makes a product than the engineers (with their dogoodery) can produce from their yenning mindsets.
Software has become more bloated regardless of manner. I trust that Apple will start to turn around this hedonism to face real problems instead of inventing new ones.
Software has become more bloated regardless of manner. I trust that Apple will start to turn around this hedonism to face real problems instead of inventing new ones.
Lt Major Burns
"Dicky" Charlteston-Burns
yes, the dashboard clearly shows that apple is thinking about an efficient OS
In a way: Yes. It's not _constantly_ in your face. But I agree that they should focus a little more on productivity. They do that as well, though: Better iCal/Mail.app integration for example coming our way. I just hope one can disable _any_ mentioning of templates in Mail.app 3.0.