86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins
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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.
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Comments
Hi, Marek Sumara. I'm pretty sure that the results would be somewhat similar if comparing the Mac Plus vs. a modern Mac. The one benchmark that would be different would be the bootup time as Macs are generally way faster than the twiddle-yer-thumbs Windows startups. The basic onus of this comparison was not to disgrace the AMD DualCore which is a great uarch, but to show that in more than two decades we really have not progressed at all when it comes to having computers help us do more in each day. Most people use Office apps, and today's computers are not really any more efficient in those basic measures of productivity than when we were watching "Life With Lucy" on ABC-TV!
Wonderful article. Brought back fond memories of using the Plus.
One minor nit: I'm sure other retrotech enthusiasts will point out that none of the browsers you mentioned will actually run on a Plus. And for sys6.0.8, there is only one: Samba (MacWWW). For sys7, there's MacWeb1.x and 2.x and a couple of others, but only MacLynx supports the HOSTS extension to allow access to virtually hosted sites. I wish that wannabe had a version for the Plus, but alas, none exists.
I agree, Hal. For most working people, a PC running Windows 98, Office 97 and Firefox on a 800MHz Celeron (or better) with 512MB RAM, 40GB hard disk and integrated graphics/sound/network chipset is probably already at the limit of usefulness. It would also be darned fast compared to today's bloated XP machines, with or without dual core.
In fact, I recently "downgraded" my admin assistant's "workstation" to a 400MHz Celeron which I got dirt cheap (as in, free -- someone was getting rid of it). Thanks for making me feel good about that decision.
You could talk also about electrical power consumption...
Hi, Tom Lee. I'm glad you enjoyed it! I definitely will stand corrected on the browser issue. As I wrote in the review, this was a list of the browsers that were "supposed" to work as we didn't test any of them. It's quite obvious that the 2007 PC would have an enormous edge in a web comparison. Surfing the web on a Plus might be a bit of a painful experience, especially since most sites today are optimized for 1024x768!
Hi, Ruhayat. I agree that with some careful OS and application selection a very large number of computers that are currently in junkyards could still be useful. It really all depends on what the computer is asked to do. As I mentioned in the piece, we weren't about to run Photoshop or Crysis as those are examples of enormous hunks of software that make huge demands on the hardware. However, when I walk through an office, I see most people doing very little other than entering cells or writing reports. We certainly don't need Teraflops to do that! With the amazing power of today's computers, we should be able to have graduated well past the standard GUI and into an interface that reads our minds! :)
Hi, Marc. Yes, the current draw of the two computers is quite different. Under normal loads, the Mac will likely draw 1/3 the electricity of the AMD. Some dual and quad core PCs with powerful video cards require 1000W power supplies! However, they're not likely to overheat and break their solder joints creating the evil compact Mac "vertical line of death" down the screen! :)
Hi !
Interesting article. Yes, the Mac Plus could get things done. As concerns Word processing, there was a fabulous application fot the Mac called WriteNow which was much faster than Word. Truly amazing, in fact. To this day, I still keep a Mac Plus in working order in a closet.
Another interesting test would be a 1986 PC vs a modern Mac...
Very interesting comparison as user's experience is true life. I'm always amaze as how much memory it takes today to run a computer be it Mac or PC. And so true...how many functions and software installed by default or with each peripherals installed afterward that people doesn't even know the existence on their computer taking valuable ressources out for good use. Not saying that those soft are of no use, but if not used by the user...what the use!!
If I may had any negative comment about the comparison is why the Windows vs Mac again.....old PC with a modern one will tend toward the same conclusion. Old Mac vs modern Mac too. Or old PC (be it with a GUI) versus modern MAC. There was no use putting in the Windows-Pc versus MAC bashing for this one. Quite annoying
Neat article. I second the idea of a 1986 PC vs. a modern Mac.
Fine article ! Thanks a lotI'll come back to my first mac classic...I will win time, money and ill will not be perturbated by internet , msn or orther losting time stuf...Unfortunatelly, my brand new macbook pro is a very nice machine....
I miss my SE. It rocked.
This is a very tempting argument. But I think it is just as valid to say "Most people have not integrated computers into their life to where the advances matter to them".
A good comparison may be the medical implant industry. While new artificial, hearts, pacemakers, insulin regulating systems and the like, don't improve the quality of life for the AVERAGE person. When they are required they are Amazing.
While I don't want to dismantle every point, I think it is valid to note that many of your pro-mac arguments go back to the age old "Mac is better, because its easier". Once you accept that argument, then you can also accept that using a $3 arithmetic calculator is better than using a $25 scientific calculator...True, but you reveal more about yourself than the tools.
As far as time to boot to desktop: Go get a drink of water. That will probably render the differences irrelavant. I enjoy my two to three reboots a day...but then again I like computers intrinsically. So I prefer power over convenience. Each new generation of computers is more powerful than the last. Its up to the consumer to purchase what they need & utilize it best.
My take is that there is a point of performance where people are happy, and beyond that they don't get much happier. Yes, I remember owning a 64k Atari and imagining the future when the entire OS would fit in ROM, and all your apps would fit in RAM. Imagine that - zero boot time and no disk load waits. And that was anticipating like a DOUBLING of RAM; today's 2GB computer has 300,000x the RAM! And you can't do ANYTHING on a computer without causing disk access. What happen!? Clearly consumers seem satisified with current levels of performance.
My take is that there is a point of performance where people are happy, and beyond that they don't get much happier. Yes, I remember owning a 64k Atari and imagining the future when the entire OS would fit in ROM, and all your apps would fit in RAM. Imagine that - zero boot time and no disk load waits. And that was anticipating like a DOUBLING of RAM; today's 2GB computer has 300,000x the RAM! And you can't do ANYTHING on a computer without causing disk access. What happen!? Clearly consumers seem satisified with current levels of performance.
My take is that there is a point of performance where people are happy, and beyond that they don't get much happier. Yes, I remember owning a 64k Atari and imagining the future when the entire OS would fit in ROM, and all your apps would fit in RAM. Imagine that - zero boot time and no disk load waits. And that was anticipating like a DOUBLING of RAM; today's 2GB computer has 300,000x the RAM! And you can't do ANYTHING on a computer without causing disk access. What happen!? Clearly consumers seem satisified with current levels of performance.
"We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications."
Interesting stuff, thanks.
Maybe it goes without saying, but I think it's reasonable to say that what people consider "basic everyday functions" have evolved enormously. For many people, "everyday functions" now includes: storing, finding, and sharing every peice of music I own, every photo I take, and every home video I shoot. Plus keeping in touch with all my friends, by multiple channels including voice chat, possibly simultaneously. While watching streaming video of last night's "Heroes" while downloading a few hundred Megs of files.
"We selected very basic everyday functions that were performed equally by the 1980's and the 2007 Microsoft applications."
Interesting stuff, thanks.
Maybe it goes without saying, but I think it's reasonable to say that what people consider "basic everyday functions" have evolved enormously. For many people, "everyday functions" now includes: storing, finding, and sharing every peice of music I own, every photo I take, and every home video I shoot. Plus keeping in touch with all my friends, by multiple channels including voice chat, possibly simultaneously. While watching streaming video of last night's "Heroes" while downloading a few hundred Megs of files.
"As far as time to boot to desktop: Go get a drink of water. That will probably render the differences irrelavant."
Even better - use that sleep/suspend feature that most modern comps have.
An interesting and entertaining article. In these days of galloping featurism (one can hardly call it "creeping" anymore) we forget how few resources are really required to accomplish many common computing tasks.
I do take issue with one comment, however:
"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 observation about C versus hand-written assembly code was perhaps true at the time that System 6.0.8 was written, and for the simpler microprocessor that the Mac Plus used. It is decidedly not the case for modern compiler technology and modern microprocessors, where the fastest code sequence is often far from obvious. Few programmers can afford to take the time to study the execution models of the machines they write code for. Most of those who do take the time are busy writing compilers for the rest of us.
I work using a Dell dual Xenon 2.8 with 3 gig of mem and a 160 gig hard drive. The fastest computer i ever used was a 20 mhz Harris 286 with a math co-pro and 4 meg of mem. on DOS running Autocad 10.0, visicalc or wordstar it was chain lightning.
Was the Windows machine running Norton/Macafee anti-virus? That slows down the machines by a factor of 2 or so, except when it takes over the machine and starts scanning, then is 1000 times slower. Too bad reviewers don't test anti-virus software on a 3 year old basic machine.
Every writer in the 80s and 90s used a Macintosh. The original macintosh was way ahead of its time, and Windows didn't catch up until the mid 90s, and only because Apple was being run by people who weren't Steve Jobs. Then writers started getting experience with PCs, and now they're comfortable with either platform, although many still prefer Macs because they're less buggy.
I think the main issue you're missing here is that the user is the speed limiter. If you scripted all the events and let the machines run at their own pace you'll find the differences will emerge. Also if you increase the amount of data in your examples the newer machine will obviously shine.
You limit your tasks to everyday things that the PC and the mac share in common. You might as well say there is no difference between the wright flyer and an F-14. They both only hold 2 people and use petroleum based fuel...lets ignore the fact that the tomcat has far more capabilities that he wright flyer could never dream of
I question your boot time. Maybe Office 07 does something horrible, but I just built an AMD X2 with 1GB RAM and loaded XP Home on it, plus Open Office, Adobe Reader and a few other things, and it still only takes about 30-35 seconds to boot. Perhaps you were using a type the name type login? The "fair" thing to do is to set the XP machine to auto-login, since that is the functionality the Mac is using.
Interesting, but moot. Your 4MB mac would crawl to a halt with any non-trivial office document. Sure, find/replace may nearly equal itself in time; but on a modern computer you could be doing that with the same speed while -many- other applications were running. How about other common business functions - reporting? An average sized mail merge into an average sized document would have smoked that mac.
Sure, common tasks may not have improved - on their own. But to say productivity has not increased... I strongly disagree. Multitasking has greatly improved. Boot times are moot; many office users do not even shut their computers down. Dare I even mention networking? Drop a 100MB 10baseT in there, and watch the CPU cycles bleed away, while the modern PC scoffs.
Bad test, one that serves no purpose other than to rouse the luddites.
Hi, MysterGag. The intent was not to revive the old tired chestnut of Mac vs. win. Let's face it, when you have octocore Mac Pros coming on the market, the Apple camp certainly doesn't have much to fear from the Win crowd. The essence of the article was to show how in more than two decades the PC user experience has not really ameliorated at all. Instead of the Mac Plus we could have used an old 80286 running Windows 1.02, but that would have been too much torture! :)
Hi, Darren Maxwell. As much as I agree that in a couple of reboots a day your monitor will only display that bootup screen for a couple of minutes, the bottom line is: After well over two decades of global personal computing, can't we come up with anything better than having to go through a DOS-type CMOS go through its paces?
Hi, Matt Walsh: Yes, people are happy with their computers but is it not a case of people adjusting to the quirks of their computers rather than the other way around. I mean we're still using a QWERTY keyboard that was designed almost a century and a half ago to keep fast typists from sticking the levers in their mechanical typewriters. How much Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and other stress-related maladies are tied into the fact that we are still asking the human body to perform the same ergonomic tasks of a 19th century typist? Does that make sense in the 21st century?
Hi, Evan. You're absolutely right and most of the functions of today's computers would choke an old Mac Plus dead. However, the various activities you've listed mostly fall into the "personal entertainment/leisure" class. The basis of the article is the type of functions that are performed by the 9-5 office worker who basically does little other than fill cells and write letters.
Hi, Hupp. You make a good point: "Even better - use that sleep/suspend feature that most modern comps have." However, most users who do not regularly reboot run into the famous molasses slog. I know that on my state-of-the-art PC if I launch Adobe CS3, work in that for a few minutes, exit and launch Microsoft FrontPage, work a bit then exit, and then launch AutoCAD, by the time I'm finished working on that CAD file, my computer is slogging along so badly that I can barely shut down AutoCAD. This factor has been present in every single PC I've used in the past decade. You have to reboot to clear all the "junk" out and start fresh. Again, this is 1970s thinking in the 21st century. There has to be a better way than that!
I appreciate everyone's comments. Keep them coming! :)
You're essentially comparing a light sedan to a semi truck. First of all, the Mac and the Athlon WILL be on-par with formats and other file operations because their hard drives are proportional to their power. Second of all, what does boot up time have to do with everything? The 86 Mac didn't have to go through a POST, load the DMI pool data and boot into Windows.
Back to my truck example. The sedan may have a higher top speed but what good does speed do when you need to pull an 80-foot trailer behind you?
Sincerely,
Apples & Oranges
You're essentially comparing a light sedan to a semi truck. First of all, the Mac and the Athlon WILL be on-par with formats and other file operations because their hard drives are proportional to their power. Second of all, what does boot up time have to do with everything? The 86 Mac didn't have to go through a POST, load the DMI pool data and boot into Windows.
Back to my truck example. The sedan may have a higher top speed but what good does speed do when you need to pull an 80-foot trailer behind you?
Sincerely,
Apples & Oranges
Hi, Mike Walker. Yes, you certainly proved by your experience that even old 80286s properly configured could work very quickly!
Hi, Carl Hage. As is specified in the article, both computers were running fresh installs of OS and relevant apps only.
Hi, Cybershark. That is the basic point of the article: The basic ergonomic process we undergo to relate to our computers these days is the same used in 1868 when the QWERTY keyboard was patented. The entire world has changed completely since the Civil War era. With all our advanced technology, can't we come up with a computing paradigm that isn't based on 140 year-old ideas?
Hi, Qqpq: The AMD was set on autologin, however keep in mind that the time specified is not just to Desktop, but "Desktop useable". Almost every Win PC I've used in the past many years will get to the Desktop while the HD is still whirring about and if you try to actually do anything in that time, the response will be very slow or non-existent.
Hi, Cosinezero: We were very clear on the bottom line of the comparison. It was not to trash the capabilities of a far more advanced computer in the AMD box, but to show that for a sizeable number of "basic everyday" functions the computing paradigm has not improved at all in over two decades. Of course the AMD is a magnificent and capable computer. We mention in the article how it's well over 1,000 faster than the old Mac!
Hi, What a moron: Again, read through the article again and the comments posted. Personally I couldn't care less whether the AMD has to go through a POST, DMI or whatever else. I would expect that with the immeasurably faster speed and capabilities of the AMD, that I wouldn't have to twiddle my thumbs while it does whatever.
I still have my SE in storage. Oh, those were the truly enjoyable computing days. No distracting Internet. Just me and my Mac.
In the computing history, is well known that hardware evolutions more rapidly than software.
But in this days is even worse, software is getting more and more fat and to perform the same task is required more and more computing power.
In the way to take computing closer to the people is getting more and more distant to the computer.
An example: azureus and utorrent are two different torrents managers and perform the same tasks.
The first require 60 Mbytes of HD for the JAVA virtual machine plus A LOT of memory versus just 200 Kbytes of HD and little RAM and processor requirements.
You take the conclussions.
Greets
If everything I have to write is scriptable, a machine can do it for me, and I would loose my job.
There are only two things that grown from the Mac Plus to current computers (be it a Mac or a PC): eletric power requirements and the time the processor waits in "idle state".
If everything I have to write is scriptable, a machine can do it for me, and I would loose my job.
There are only two things that grown from the Mac Plus to current computers (be it a Mac or a PC): eletric power requirements and the time the processor waits in "idle state".
I would like to see the same "amd with xp vs amd with linux". I agree with the guy that said you should take into account were transfering huge video files, burning dvds and old macs just can't do that. Techonology advances at societys demand. But windows is fridgin crazy with system resources, unix based os's increase spped sooo much. My celeron D running pcbsd is 10 times faster than my core2duo 2 gig vista pc.
Hi, Ted: Couldn't agree more. Yes, the SE was a great little machine. My personal favourite was the SE/30. It seemed that there was nothing that little box couldn't handle. I had it hooked up to a 21" Trinitron and it was amazing.
Hi, Darukur: I began the article with the word Bloat and your example fits right in there to illustrate how fat and unwieldly today's software has become. Is it really necessary to cram so much code into an app? Can't some functions that nobody really uses or even knows about be left out, or turned into an optional extra install?
Hi, Rafasgj: Electric consumption and idle states. That pretty well says it all. Right on! :)
Hi, Michael: Yes, for all of Linux's varied efficiency advantages, the bottom line is that in office settings most people still use Windows.
That was an entertaining light read, but in the interest of the less scientifically literate, the +/- 0.1 second error margin should be factored into the results and presentation thereof.
It might not be entirely unreasonable to assume the lack of rigour in analysis and presentation extends to the other aspects of the methodology...
Viel Spass!
That was an entertaining light read, but in the interest of the less scientifically literate, the +/- 0.1 second error margin should be factored into the results and presentation thereof.
It might not be entirely unreasonable to assume the lack of rigour in analysis and presentation extends to the other aspects of the methodology...
Viel Spass!
It strikes me that most of the comparison here is about an old OS versus a new OS. I'm not really sure that an Intel would do any better or worse. To post this article as a comparison to an AMD product hardly seems fair. Comparing it to a modern Microsoft OS product would seem to be more appropriate.
It strikes me that most of the comparison here is about an old OS versus a new OS. I'm not really sure that an Intel would do any better or worse. To post this article as a comparison to an AMD product hardly seems fair. Comparing it to a modern Microsoft OS product would seem to be more appropriate.
I remember an old episode of the Computer Chronicles pitted an Apple IIe against the "New" original Macintosh.
Simple number calculation programs were run on both, and the Apple II would beat the Mac.
I think that the point here is that every computer must be used with the software that was designed for it.
So the problem is when you install Win XP and Office 2010, to that old 800 mhz- PC.! software upgrade requires hardware upgrade :)
Considering how bad modern bloatware is I am surprised there are not more operating systems (or software) like Menuet. http://www.menuetos.net/
Ahhh, the Mac Plus. It could be argued that the multi-billion-dollar desktop publishing industry was birthed on the Mac Plus, the first industrial-strength publishing computer.
What about trying some old NeXT Color Slab or better a color Cube. There were some pretty decent word processing, spreadsheet and opaque window move.
I remember the frustration of loading Pools of Radiance every few minutes off a floppy disk with my Commodore 64. That was frustrating. As was loading off tapes. However, apart from those delays, I get more frustrated with the long delays and bloat of modern software. I may be doing a lot more with it
I gather the point of the (really interesting) post was that, rather than to claim anything about true relative performance of the systems,
The BMW 3-series looks more like the 5-series from a while back (size, weight, features). Mobile phones went from simple and slick to wonderfully complex and sluggish. Hell, it even takes longer to get on an aeroplane these days!
Certainly, an interesting article, but in the end one that has no relevance. How can you say that you can do the same things on Word from 1987 and Word from 2007? Can you import and embed truecolor images into Word from 1987? How about pull info from a database? Mail merge? Anything many people do on a day to day basis? How about "multitasking"? System 6.0.8 *did not multitask*. You had one app, it controlled the system, case closed. Also, to blame the OS or underlying architecture for bad programming is silly. You say you use CS3, and then Frontpage, and then AutoCAD, everything slows down. Have you noticed that every single Adobe product has slowed down at every revision? That most, if not all, Adobe products leave bits and pieces of themselves in memory after being "closed." Try using some programs that were actually programmed *correctly* and see how things happen. I typically have 5-10 IE6 windows, SQL Enterprise Manager, Macromedia (Adobe, now, sadly) Dreamweaver, Excel, MSN, all running and usable, along with an anti-virus, a movie or music playing in the background, and innumerable other things going on at once, and most everything works beautifully and quickly. Yes, I get a second or two of lag from time to time, but if I close down Dreamweaver, everything speeds up significantly (are we sensing a trend here...?) I think a more accurate comparison in usability would be to compare Windows from 1987 and MacOS from 1987, and then perhaps Windows XP and Tiger. I personally still contend that XP is much easier and more powerful, but thats a personal decision, and opinion, and I'm not making any point-by-point comparisons. Would System 6.0.8 whip Windows from 1987? It sure would, no doubt. But this kind of comparison serves as nothing but a way to inflame one side or another. The reality is this: businesses, employees, and casual computer users do nearly EVERYTHING different now than they did back in 1987. We still use keyboards and mice, but thats about it. Look at what you do on a day to day basis and think about it. As a last point, tell me this...if I write a good novel in Word on a Mac Plus it likely wouldn't fit on the floppy disk...but if I did the same on a PC (that had a floppy...but thats another argument for another time) I'd be able to take that same floppy to another system, open it, and edit my document...and it would all fit! Face it...400/800K floppies just aren't what they used to be anymore ;)
While I often agree that the massive amounts of computing power at the average schmoe's disposal is about a gagillion times more than they "need" ... the primary reason most people are now comfortable working with computers when 20 years ago they were fearful and hateful of them: they're look pretty now.
Throw an old Mac in front of the average person today and they'll recoil in aesthetic horror. Try presenting them with the Web via Lynx or even Mosaic with all the useless glamour stripped away -- they'd never touch it.
So, while the machines are 3,000 times as powerful in order to generally perform the same task and that may seem like waste, how many times more users are there twenty years hence that wouldn't use those machines were they not crammed full of "useless" bling? I would guess it's probably a pretty even trade.
Let's compare ripping a CD and encoding to mp3 or ogg too!
I always try to stay behind on the os game to gain performance. The problem is that most new operating systems always include a feature or two that makes you want to upgrade. Possible exception to this is Vista. I remember running win3.1 when people were switching to win2000 and laughing at me but I was just fine running with the existing applications and as long as I didn't try the latest software I was just fine.
The argument above about digital music/video/photos is irrelevant. The limitation there is disk space and you can still handle them on win2k if you upgrade your disk.
There's really no technological reason that a faster, more capable machine has to be just as slow from the user perspective as a 20 year-old machine. Take boot time, for example. By replacing the archaic BIOS with Linbios you can boot modern PCs to a Linux console in under 3 seconds, so don't tell me that the slow speeds are purely an artifact of dealing with more complex hardware. Point is, back in the old days when hardware was minimal and power was scarce, programmers cared a lot about maximizing user experience. Good programmers thought small, and took great pains to minimize timing cycles. It wasn't just the language they programmed in, it was how they thought about programming. If a routine took forty lines, they'd see if they could shave it to fifteen. I remember counting clock cycles in some frequently used routines. Who does that now? (Incidentally, the articles I read when the Mac came out claimed that the MAC O/S was mainly written in Pascal, and optimized in C and 68kAssembler to get it to fit in 128K of ROM)
Today everybody is very impressed by how many trillions of lines of code Vista takes. That kind of code volume sounds like the "infinite number of monkeys" eventually banging out an OS by random chance, rather than crafting it to be something small, swift and powerful.
Excellent article!!!! I just cannot believe the sad state of our industry when a "new" operating system requires 1G just to runs its working set and the call stack to send a few words over the Internet approaches 100 calls in a modern appserver! I guess efficient programming is dead. I remember running Mozilla on NT 3.1 in 12MB.... ran fine. What I'd like to see is Linux target this level of efficiency more. While a common desktop distro like Fedora, Ubuntu, or Mandriva only eats a few hundred MB versus softie's total bloat RAM waste, I'd like to see a much leaner OS footprint overall.
Why didn't you do Vista? With over 2 GB of RAM, Vista SMOKES XP at loading simple programs, since it does it all from RAM.
You make an interesting, relevant point. As soon as computers get more powerful, superfluous features are added to suck up that comuting power. I remember Steve Jobs noting that the 'OK' button flased in OS X beta because "We've got a gigaflop in there sitting idle!"
Personally, I'd love to stick with Office 2000/Windows 2000 on the fastest hardware possible, but the problem is in the business environment you are stuck with the lowest common denominator. If your MD has Office 2007, sends you a document for proofing - guess what? You're going to have to use Office 2007 to fix his errors. Go with the flow, embrace the bling, and rest assured new hardware and software advances will continue to nullify each other.
Wanted to mention this is why a simply OLPC or other laptop is fine for kids writing school papers. There is no need to spend over $500 and probably much less is practical.
BTW, the laptops here at a major telco take about 15 minutes from pressing the power button until Microsoft Office Communicator (the first app that starts) can actually login. We take precautions to use suspend mode overnight and try to keep the batteries powered over the weekend.
What Mr. Licino states is actually exactly on target: it is the user experience, doing the things the user normally does, that matters. The corollary to this is that, beyond the point where a user can perceive a difference in speed, there is no longer any reason for devoting processing power and development effort towards making things go faster. Thus, so long what I type appears within, say, .05 seconds of my typing it, I can't tell the difference. We can then use all this processing power and development effort towards making things easier to use, more flexible, adding capabilities, etc. Now, whether things are actually easier to use or more flexible may be debatable...but we do have capabilities that most of us couldn't even dream of.
The other comment I would add is that there is a reasonable well-studied phenomenon in which people's thought processes will slow down or speed up to match the speed of the user interface. In other words, if you have a slow interface, people will get less work done but won't perceive themselves as working more slowly. It is interesting to note that, in many cases, common tasks are actually taking longer and is certainly possible that there is a real, objective, productivity drop occurring of which we are completely unaware. Interesting, and possibly a bit troubling.
"the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity"
The thing is, in the course of your own article, you talk about all the things you DIDN'T test because the 86 Mac couldn't handle it. Part of productivity these days is about surfing the web and running processor heavy applications. And productivity is more than simply the amount of time it takes to do something.
This is a pretty fascinating article from a 'gee-whiz' department, but, I don't think you've really made a good case for relevance in terms of productivity. I think you've made a case here for 'efficient use of available computer resources', but that's a different problem altogether.
JGH
Yet I believe that there is always space for a tryly well-written application, without the need of bloatware and resource-wasting.
I for one have an Atari Falcon running MiNT right near my dualXeonPC. Well, it happens that sometimes, for some tasks, it is easier for me to fire up my Atari, do the job, and shut it off while waiting for XP64 to boot.
Of course, I can't do Autocad Architechture, but you can bet that I can swap colours in a TIFF graph, write extremely sophisticated documents (something that Word does not get yet) basic Web browsing, mail and FTP all with a noiseless tiny fan blowing on my Motorola 68060 processor.
So, people just should have the balls to use the right tool for the right job.
</rant>
Even with IDE, I don't see how you'd get such a terrible boot time. I have essentially the same AMD system except with a SATA2 drive. By the time my display is ready, so is my desktop. I have never had a system boot so fast.
I'm also tempted to question the 4MB of RAM (all you can expect to cram in there) vs the 1GB (a quarter of what you can expect), but to be fair it doesn't matter. A Mac Pro will benefit more from the RAM than the AMD will with this kind of usage, but I would be interested to know how it performs with less RAM.
Another thing to keep in mind when discussing productivity is the thing that I, as a computing professional, am most ashamed of:
Modern computers have enabled massive government regulations and restrictions of freedom.
For 35 years, my father has had his own one-man psychological practice. He's been up on the latest technology the entire time. He and a CS grad student got together for their doctoral dissertation in the late 1960s: for his doctorate, the CS student wrote statistical software that my father used to juggle the data necessary to obtain his doctorate.
In 1979, my father got his first "IBM-compatible" computer (which in 1979 meant something totally different than it did ten years later). I started turning in reports in Junior High School that were typed with the SP6502 text processor and printed with a dot-matrix computer -- and boy, were my teachers impressed!
I got my own C=64 as soon as the things were cheap enough, and I've become a sysadmin in my own right professionally.
So I can safely say that my father has been on the cutting edge of technology all of his life.
He tells me that the entire process of continually automating more of his work has had absolutely no impact on his productivity or the profitability of his business. Why? Because the exact same technology in the hands of government has enabled government to exert increasingly onerous restrictions and regulatory requirements on his business.
In short, the technology has simply allowed him to keep pace with government edicts.
If we really want to increase general productivity and profitability, we need what I like to call the "One Hand-Written Law Per Page Amendment." This would require all laws to be written by a Congressman or a Senator with a quill pen. It would need to be legible and comprehensible to anyone with a greater than 6th grade public education. Each bill must be no longer than one hand-written page. At no time are bills or laws allowed to be converted to electronic medium. Furthermore, Congressmen and their staff are limited to record-keeping methods and technologies as were available in 1779, i.e. quill pens, hand-made parchment paper, and filing systems comprised of (at best) hand-made wooden boxes.
That ought to keep the bastards from using technology against us. :)
It´s an interesting point you´re trying to make here.
But really, talking about "common office tasks" and not having ANY email/connectivity tests is absolutely insane. This is a HUGE productivity booster anyway you look at it.
Should have compared the Plus to a modern Mac. Boot to Desktop time would have been similar to a MacBook.
Cars today drive on the same roads as cars from a hundred years ago. Therefore there have CLEARLY been no advances in car technology since cars were first invented.
Of course the Mac Plus should be faster just the price tells it all... ;-)
A Mac Plus was something like $2500 (and that is 1986 USD) when new, and the PC system mentioned could probably be put together for under $1000 today.
So the bang for the buck goes to the new PC... :-P
The article incorrectly implies the comparison is between hardware architectures, when it's really all about the software. Even on the same platform, by installing different operating systems, ie. Linux vs. Windows, you can have a completely different "user experience", if this is the aim of the article. The bloatware found in today's computers aren't the result of shoddy hardware and inefficient architectures, but of the software of choice. Modern hardware architectural advances are so vastly different and so much more efficient that, had the AMD architecture be running the ancient Mac OS, it would eat it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and all applicable snacks. To imply there is any form of hardware comparison in this article is just unfair.
Windows is bloatware, that can't be disputed, while ancient OS's (yes, even Windows 3.1 or DOS) are much more efficient in comparison. To compare lean-to-lean, it would make more sense to compare a stripped down Linux-based installation on a modern PC to the ancient OS's, so that it would be a closer comparison, like apples to oranges, as opposed to comparing an apple to a Lamborghini...a comparison that simply does not make sense.
while a numebr of you continue to miss the point...
hi what a moron says, but who cares if you can tow 85 tons when I only need to tow 50 lbs? This is about use in an office setting for typical day to day functionality to get work done. THe kind of stuff that joe user does everyday, read email, chat on aim, play with office docs, etc. Not too many people store all of their photos on the computers they use at the office.
the thing people are hung up on here is multitasking. the reality is that the extent to which you are usually multitasking is excesively minimal. more often it is dual tasking with lots of open applications minimized doing nothing that you dont want to open and close.
mikewalker: comparing autocad on that machine to a current machine is proposterous. Todays autocad software is immensley more complex and resource intensive because of the 3D graphical display capabitlities that it has which make it tremendously more productive.
which actually gets to my central issue here, the comparison is horribly flawed. You have too many variables, and haven't demonstrated any control at all. You haven't sadly demonstrated anything. You are comparing using a bicycle for city travel to using a plane to fly worldwide essentially.
Case in point, fire up EMACS on the windows XP machine (or on a linux one, that would have been an interesting test especially in your choice of word processor) and run that for your search times. You didn't choose to have the mac run microsoft word, but you make the new machine do it. Ok how about running a spellcheck test? How about auto formatting, indentation and such? or creating a table. Then you let the mac off the hook for all the abilities that it doesn't have. example, oh you wanted to track changes? oh you wanted to do a mail merge? oh you have some complex documents images inpowerpoint or pdfs, well we won't test that.
The time differences between the two for office apps is neglible according to your own error epsilon. But even that aside they are still neglible. Why? becuase they are as fast as they can be already. The largest slowdown is human I/O. Everytest that you compare except for boottime are both so short that they are already trivial or of neglible difference between the two.
I'd like to see the Mac open up a database thats bigger than 1 megabyte, or bigger than 100 megabytes and watch it suffer.
As for boot time, well the mac doesn't have to deal with the devices that the windows machine has to deal with, why not be fair and disable the usb ports, the network card, the modem, the display adapater (use the integrated pos), system monitoring, anti virus, and other processes that have nothing to do with the tasks being tested that the mac isnt having to run.
a more interesting test to highlight how silly this one was, use the amd machien but this time use gentoo instead of windows, without X. heck even with X if you must, but you don't get to include a network adapter since that is one of the largest slowdowns if you are using DHCP. you can use emacs for everytest you want to run just about.
Underneath it all however yuo have in incredibly valid point, one that both Mac and Windows suffer from. sure they get shinier and shinier but in terms of productivity they arent increasing and haven't much in a while. The biggest resource hug that has been introduced has been multimedia files, images and music, and the internet.
further example of bloatware? joe average using any of the 3 latest adobe photoshop editions. Why is it big and slow? because its loading the picture into memory and then support for a billion functions that joe average never uses or even realizes exist. He could probably get the same results from using the lightwieght windows photo editor for his cropping, red eye, resizing and auto restore. Sure the more advanced people want the advanced features, but many of the "photoshoppers" out there who manage their photos ever do any real digital editing to them? probably very very few.
its part of our current societys nature. compare times taken to get around for an average driver using a honda civic to some american V8 car and to a hummer. what do you know with the speed limit being what it is I get everywhere pretty much just as fast. with modern technology shuoldnt I be able to get places faster or less expensively?
the thing is as we all observe people like luxury, and the bulk of computer use and cost is for the luxury components of it. After all for joe average computer user who isn't a developer and isn't playing FPS or trying to do massive digita audio/video editing what does he/she need a dual core for anyhow? Oh right one to run the windows bloat one to work on actual work lol
I understand that this is intended to be a contest of "standard" uses. And really a test of operating systems not platforms. And I hate what Microbloat has done to PC's. That said what I use my PC won't even load on the old Mac. I run 3D cad at work all day. The advances in equipment have made possible on a Pc that which only could be done on a mainframe system in 1990. All equipment manufacturers have made trememdous strides in capability. My biggest gripe about OS's and software is the lack of forward-backward capability. Office was mentioned before, but the CAD manufacturers have a lock on non-backward capability, they do it intentionally using code based locks! I'm supprised that they haven't had their pants sued off about this. The entire software industry (at the top anyway) seems to be controled by decievers and charlatains. I can't wait until I can run my application on Linux.
"You have to reboot to clear all the "junk" out and start fresh. Again, this is 1970s thinking in the 21st century. There has to be a better way than that!"
^ That's cause you're using Windows. Try Ubuntu 7.04 (no ATI video cards please), and you'll realize what snappiness is.
Could you please open 1 Excel workbook, 1 Browser (your choice), 1 Email Client (your choice), 1 Word Doc and give yourself a network conection to shared drives?
This would be a closer comparison to an actual work enviroment.
Ohh and sense we are comparing the speed of the machines and not the OS's (or did you just title this wrong?) how about we through Gentoo on that AMD?
Lame
Modern day cpus have so many more instructions, and with the right optimizations, any software could run faster on todays CPUs (ALU ops are faster, and there are more cycles, not to mention all the media instructions (SSE 1,2,3 + 3dnow)). Really, this shows that the XP OS is frugal with giving resources to the benchmarks. At least you are doing something semi-productive :)
The only thing you didn't compare is the price in inflation-adjusted terms. The modern system costs about the same as the Mac... and has more capabilities (even if used occasionally). Given that the costs are the same which system would you choose?
I'd like to once again thank everyone for the comments. They're coming in so fast that I can't possibly reply to them all. Please keep in mind that the essence of the comparison is to take a common graphical-GUI computer from two decades ago, compare it against a common computer today, and see if there has been a quantum leap in the most "basic common" office uses, which are using a word processor and spreadsheet for the most "basic common" uses. Most office computers today use Win XP. That's why that OS was chosen. Vista, Linux, et al. do not have the installed base in "basic common" offices that Win XP does. The Mac Plus was chosen since we couldn't bear to dig Win 1.02 from its well-deserved grave. It is irrelevant to discuss the Mac Plus' web surfing ability, or colour image manipulation, or torrent handling, as none of those factors were in general office use in 1986. This is not and has never been an "Old Mac is better than a New AMD" comparison. If we had compared a 80286 against a Mac Pro, the results would not have been that much different. It is an attempt to flag the creeping bloat which has entered our software, makes enormous and ever-escalating demands on our hardware, and effectively does not provide "equivalent" improvements in the "User Experience," which from a "basic common" office use standard is essentially stuck in the 1980s or even before.
I think a lot of people are missing the point, and arguing particular issues that are obvious. I don't remember the reference, but I'm told that with modern software, something like 90% or all the users take advantage of only about 10% of the features. Perhaps you recall the phrase "creeping featurism" that happens with all software over time - more and more software features get added into software, causing bloat. These days, it appears to be a way of life, and people have just grown to accept it. I, for one, don't, but I put up with what's necessary. It's also how a lot of companies make money - they will "improve" software, and stop supporting old software, forcing you to upgrade.
But, that's not the point of this article. I recall reading a book on system performance tuning, and the one underlying principle of the book was that "A computer is slow when the users say it is." If the end user thinks a system is slow, it doesn't matter why (hardware, software bloat, whatever), they will declare it slow, and that's what matters.
IMO, software development needs to become more modular, so that performance can improve. You only load the features you need, at the time, so that a user's perception of performance is positive, instead of just taking it because they have to.
In economics this is called the "Law of Deminishing Returns"!
This could be related to Moores law and called the law of "the harder I work the behinder I get".
Dood, learn some basic math. 15,000 x 1MB is not 1.5GB, it's 15GB. So Vista *merely* requires 1,500x more storage than a Mac Plus.
Great article! I agree 100%; things are getting worse, not better.
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
This last statement is where the article goes from amusing and fun to asanine and misguided. Would a computer that launched excel and word in a millisecond be a more productive system?
Hi, Jon T. Well put. It all goes back to how much the human has to adapt to the machine instead of the other way around.
Hi, Math Guy. The article states: "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." So when you write "Dood, learn some basic math. 15,000 x 1MB is not 1.5GB, it's 15GB. So Vista *merely* requires 1,500x more storage than a Mac Plus" who's the one with the weird math? :)
Hi, Brian Norton. No, a computer that was 21 years more advanced than a Mac Plus shouldn't be using the same "sit upright at a desk hitting buttons with your fingers and moving a mouse" paradigm at all. The fault is not in the software/hardware, but in the hardheaded insistence to stick with an ergonomic structure for data interface that dates back to the Civil War.
I continue to use a circa 1986 MSDOS application on my tre modern dual core workstation and would note that it does perform at roughly 1000X the speed that it did on the old deskpro 286 it ran on originally. I continue to use this app for to avoid exactly the problem shown, prefering to have the 3 orders of magnitude improvement in performance over additional functionality that is unused and a bit of eye candy.
my G5 running 10.4 takes 25 seconds to boot to full usable state, if i disable sharing and all my addons (like shape shifter and apache) i bet i could get it down to 10 seconds
I agree with all of those that disagree with this study.
The author points out that one user stating that he wants to have voice chat, watch streaming videos, etc, etc, is irrelevant because he only meant in a "working environment."
READ THIS POINT...
BUT...If word processing and spreadsheets were the only useful features on computers these days, then new computers WOULD STILL BE LIKE THE MAC PLUS. The reason for all of what the author calls "bloatware" is to back up all of the functions that ARENT word processing; streaming video, audio, multitasking, surfing 6 websites at once, e-mail, etc, etc.
What more do you want? So the Mac can boot up and load up some crappy word processing software faster than Windows can...Who cares? We're talking SECONDS out of a 24 hour day. I don't get it. Most users can boot up and within 1 minute and 30 seconds (usually less) be typing away in their word processing software.
THE QUESTION IS
How much faster and more productive can you possibly want?
Do you want to sit down at a blank screen, start typing and it is all recorded in to a magically-0-second-boot word processor?
There are LOGICAL and PHYSICAL LIMITS here!
Basically your argument reads:
"We are so bloated it now takes a whopping 70 seconds to get started processing word documents!"
WHO CARES? All of this gigantic "bloat" is NOT for word processingand spreadsheet software, its to handle everything that MODERN DAY PCs DO.
Hi, Joey Toms. In all the boring clerical-type offices where I've been lately, any employee caught at his computer while "streaming video, audio, multitasking, surfing 6 websites at once," would be fired! :)
Interesting, but I also have to strongly disagree with your conclusion that there have been no productivity improvements, for two reasons:
1) as others have said, we can now do things with these machines that were not even possible before
2) you've focused on tasks where the modern computer would be idle much of the time. Obviously, if the machine is idle 99% of the time, how fast it is will make practically no difference. It's like trying to test how quickly someone can run without actually moving. Where the newer hardware & software really pay off, is in tasks that would involve the user waiting for the machine, such as image processing, video encoding, etc.
I think your best point is that user interface has not progressed in nearly the same way as the hardware & OS. Personally I think current UI is quite usable in general, but I do have gripes with it. For example, even in Vista I often find that I have to manually resize windows (& GUI elements within windows), so I can see the information... I have a huge screen - can't the software just resize the window (and GUI elements within it) automatically, so I can see the information, instead of subjecting me to this tedium? It wouldn't even take a lot of CPU cycles to do that, but I see practically no applications that will do that for me.
As for "bloat", there's waaay more memory and processing power available today, to pine for the "good old days" when memories and programs were smaller seems misguided to me. IOW - in modern systems we have huge memories (2 GB is getting to be a standard), then why would you care how large the software is, so long as it works reliably and performs well?
What matters is the cost of the machine, and the overall user experience. On the cost side things are clearly improving- the cost of a usable computer now is far less than what it used to be. The user experience has also improved, especially for "power users" who are really putting their machines to work in a serious way.
Thanks for the article,
-Adam63 seconds before the XP system desktop was usable? Huh? Mine is usable in half that time, including the post screen and login, etc.
Fun read!But looking at it seriously: what you've shown is that there has been little or no progress if you're still doing only 1984 things with your computer. In other words: the Mac Plus was perfect for what you'd want to do with a computer then. The Mac would not fare so well if you also tried web browsing (which it can be made to do with an incredible amount of effort). And watching youtube or listening to MP3s is way out.And that's where all the cycles are going: allowing you to do new things with modern computers.Compare it to cars: top speed kept increasing until the sixties, and was a leading sales driver. By then every car went fast enough, and completely different factors took over. You definitely don't want to drive a 60s car today (well, with the exception of a Volvo Amazon and a couple of US cars, maybe).
Let's compare ripping a CD and encoding to mp3 or ogg too!
-----------------
Except you couldn't listen to the MP3 on the old Mac computer and I'm not sure it even supported CD-ROM. I don' think my old IBM 486DX2-50 would decode fast enough for 128bps Stereo MP3 playback. It's one reason I upgraded to a 750MHz Athlon. The Athlon 750 would barely run video. I upgraded recently to a Macmini.
Interesting article....but only if you define a PC as a fancy word processor/spreadsheet machine. As noted by the MP3 comment (and my take on it), what we expect from our home computers now is vastly different. My Macmini is basically an infotainment hub, serving video/audio and web content. We all hate the 'bloat', but nobody is so upset with the extra few wasted milliseconds/seconds to give up all the other stuff we use our PC's for. The tests performed really just prove that either machine is preferable to an IBM selectric typewriter and an HP Business calculator.
Enjoy.
I really like that type of information, it create lots of interesting comments, I have to admit when I use to create apps in assembler (z80,6502,6509,8086,80286 etc...), it took ages to create specially the commenting part :-) , but it was fast. This is odd I actually stop lowlevel programming when I bought a Mac.
And just for the fun of it, I timed booting windows XP on my Macbook(cold start) Core duo 2, this mean I have to press option to select the windows (bootcamp)partition, then wait till windows actually give me control, 73 seconds, 10 sec later the network stuff become available. I did the same thing with parallels desktop for mac booting my Windows XP VM, I took less then 30 seconds, oddity in life. While booting the latest and greatest portable Acer Aspire, still with XP it took over 2 minutes
Thank you Mr Licino
One thing to note - in a lot of these tests, if you increase the size of the documents by a factor of 10 or even 100, the PC won't be very much slower, while the Mac will slow to a crawl. For example, a search/replace in a 500K document is essentially not possible on a Mac Plus, but would finish in seconds on the PC.
And the 640-cell Excel spreadsheet seems on the small side; I regularly use 10,000-cell spreadsheets with ease. As an example - I have a spreadsheet that's about 1400 rows (a list of books, authors, ISBN, etc.). I can load this sheet in under three seconds, and perform a simple calculation (separate first and last names into two cells) on all 1500 rows in well under a second.
So yeah, maybe in average tasks they're even... but medium to large tasks can now be done in realtime on the PC instead of leaving the Mac to sit and process. And that's definitely an increase in productivity.
The title of this article is horribly misleading. Call is Mac Plus vs. Vista, or Windoze, but don't sully the name of AMD over the fact that Windoze is a pig. The times would have been just as bad if not worse for any other CPU that bloaty software was running on top of.
It is similar to have a land speed race between a cheeta, and a toaster. They are not things that can be reasonably compared in the environment you are putting them.
This is why OS X rocks over XP and Vista on similarly outfitted machines. It isn't weighed down with a lot of code you will never use, it doesn't install a bunch of crapware to your hard drive, and it doesn't contain a lot of legacy support for hardware that hardly anyone uses anymore. You can get a lot more done with less powerful hardware on a Mac than on a PC simply because the OS is so much lighter it doesn't need more power.
I think that alot of people talking about how the times are totally reasonable or pointing out that the Mac Pluss can't do a lot of things like play mp3s or browse the interent are missing on very big point. The AMD X2 is undeiablly faster bigger and better than the Mac Pluss by 1000 fold. (Actually with all of the tricks like pipelining, graphics cards, other neat hardware optimizations and some of the optimizations stack, it may be more like a million times faster.) So todays today computers are undeniablly 1000 times faster than the computers like the Mac Pluss. Yet when perfoming the same task the benchmarks come up very close to one another, this means that over the past 20 years the software has gotten 1000 times slower to compensate for the faster hardware.
Once or twice a year, I fire up my Quadra 650 (1993) to scan from an old LaCie tabloid scanner (picked up cheap 5 years ago) into Photoshop 2.5. What a joy to use. The scanning itself takes time but the response of the GUI is great. Now, if only Hell Cats over the Pacific would use more than 16 colors...
Interesting, but completely useless. As a 512e and later a IIvx owner, I used Macs for over a decade. I now am a PC user, and while I like the Mac asthetic, I use a lot of the aps/games made exclusively for PC. (Macs still rule the shareware/freeware world though.)
That all said, the fact that applications have to display millions of colors and enable technologies such as USB etc. seems overlooked by the 'comparison'. Modern Excel has capabilities that Mac Plus era Excel simply could not do.
Ask anyone who spent entire weeks working on publishing projects, or vector artwork on an 80s era Mac whether they'd like to go back to using a plus and they'll not even bother to answer.
Is there bloat? Yes, but because consumers demand more.
My cell phone is faster and (apart from the keyboard entry) can do more than a Mac Plus (has more RAM too.)
Finally, there's no browsing the Internet on a Mac Plus, no Flash graphics, no World of Warcraft (now we know the real reason its faster), no Itunes, and most of important all, no color.
There isn't that much difference in the way we use computers now vs. 10 years ago, unlike the previous 10 years. Demonstrating the last 10 years of bloat under Microsoft's dominance would be a much more interesting comparison.
Take that same AMD dual-core system, bump it to 2GB of RAM (or even 4GB), then compare different software from 1997 and 2007 on the SAME hardware:
* 2007: Windows Vista (not XP!), Office 2007, IE 7, Firefox 2.0, etc.
* 2007: Fedora 7 Linux, OpenOffice.org, Firefox 2.0, etc.
* 1997: Windows NT 4.0, Office 97, IE 4.0, Netscape 4.0, etc.
* 1997: Windows 95 (OSR2.5), Office 97, IE 4.0, Netscape 4.0, etc.
* 1997: OS/2 Warp 4, Office 97, IE 4.0, Netscape 4.0, etc.
After all, the user experience and the way we use computers hasn't changed that much in the last 10 years, but the experience in 1997 was hugely different from 1986...
Actually, including Windows XP on the 2007 side would also be interesting to show Vista bloat, but leaving Vista out entirely certainly misses a big point of comparison!
That's ridiculous. How much faster do you think you could paste, find/replace, save, scroll, et cetera, when you start off with nearly instantaneous times to begin with? You're saying that we should have come up with something to make us significantly more efficient. But when computing begins exceptionally efficiently (well, home computing, at least), then there's not much that we can do to improve it. Just because our PCs are thousands of times faster than before doesn't mean that we can possibly perform certain tasks any faster.
This was a great article - lots of fun to read. It's so amazing how slow today's blazing fast computers are. I recall in 1996 saying, "all I ever need is a 1Ghz machine with 512MB of ram". Now with a dual core 2Ghz intel chip and 3GB of ram, my machine is not nearly as responsive as it should be. Mac OS 9 and win95 were much snappier than OS X and XP/Vista.Web surfing and email might be the MOST COMMON tasks for computers today. At least emailing in addition to word processing. The test should move to more recent machines such as a brand spanking new compaq presario running Windows NT on a Pentium I and a just released Quadra 650 with Mac OS 8 versus the top of the line multi-core PCs.That would allow a closer comparison of actual daily tasks, including word, excel, powerpoint, email, and web surfing.Thanks for the article,-msbob
I can still type faster than an old mac can register... till the PC got past 66Mhz 486, I would always be waiting for the computer to catch up to my typing.
As for the MAC plus... I used one of those in grade school.... it was ALWAYS breaking down, locking up, etc.
And.. if you had configured the PC correctly... you can fully boot up in 30 seconds or less. A "clean" windows install does not equal a "optimized" windows install.
Hehe.. try running Folding @ Home on a MAC Plus... ROFL!!!!
Maybe for computer illiterate people they will see no difference in a MAC Plus and a new PC in productivity.. but if you actually know how to use a computer.. there is a world of difference!
It seems to me that the user experience has vastly improved in one area: multi-tasking. Right now my work laptop is running Outlook, a tabbed browser with 4 different pages open, a ticket tracker, 2 ssh windows, and 2 different IDEs. All that stuff is directly used in the work I do every day, and as it goes that's a fairly light load for me.
My modern system lets me juggle all these apps with ease. But if my memories of the early Macs hold up, that wouldn't be the case with one of those systems, which were generally only capable of running a small number of programs at a time. That means that if I wanted to start working on one task, I would probably have to close something else down first, even though I would likely just be loading it back up 15 minutes later. Not a very fluid user experience in my book.
I enjoyed the concept of this article. I have known this, from a "touchy feely" point of view; for many years. I have another approach that has worked well in my household.
I have a linux network in my house but my 12 year old wanted a machine that would play some windows based games. I took a 2.3 Ghz machine that was a couple of years old; installed a clean version of Windows ME (dont laugh yet) using the 98micro option of 98Lite; added an open source memory manager that fixed the dreaded memory leak problems of all DOS based windows systems; added an older, completely functional, firewall that does not require internet explorer (since it is not there anyway); found hardware drivers for using the newer hardware on Windows ME; performed the normal 9x speed tweaks; and added Axis print monitor for using my networked printers (inkjet & dot matrix).
I chose ME because it is essentially 98se with the same networking stack as Windows2000 and has full USB support. 98Lite took out all the useless crap that came with ME and replaced windows explorer shell with the shell from windows95. This is one very lean operating system setup.
This is easily the fastest machine that I have ever owned. It is fully functional for most people who do not need all the garbage that Microsoft tries to throw on us as "improvements." It has very few vulnerabilities because the vulnerable code is not there. It boots in about 5 seconds and shuts down instantly. Wintop rarely reports that this machine ever uses more than 10 percent of the processor at any given time and it never hits the virtual memory.
The latest Firefox, Open Office, Media Player Classic (for watching DVDs,) Kermit95 within the filesystem limitations, Irfanview, and Diablo2 all function flawlessly and extremely quick.
This system will never pry me away from the Linux habit that I have had since 1995, but nonetheless it is extremely capable and impressive.
I think some people are missing a point: Software with the same capabilities can be written much more efficiently. The comparison between azureus and utorrent mentioned above is exactly what the article is getting at. What is it about azureus that makes it so big? Another example are some machines I bought for our group a year or so back. They were 1.2ghz celerons with 512 megs of RAM. On WinXP they dragged, but I threw on Win2K and they flew. What can you do with XP that you can't do with 2K? Nothing we needed to do. So I took a $350 PC and made it do on Win2K what a $1000 machine would be needed to do on WinXP.
But imagine if the software didn't push the hardware and new features were added that did not require more resources. People wouldn't need to upgrade every couple years and the "computer economy" would slow significantly.
It would also be interesting to compare price paid for each, in inflation adjusted dollars of course. :)
Not sure if this was mentioned or not... but while this was a "basic tasks" comparison, it falls far short of what basic tasks are today. Yeah, Excel, Word... but youre leaving out messaging, email and network file sharing. Even the most basic computer users at my company (with 10,000 employees) uses groupwise, messaging and network file sharing at fibre speed. While I think you were right in your comparison, it is too narrow to be taken seriously. Computers are produced they way they are produced because the consumer wants the cheapest available with the flashiest things. What youre asking for doesn't really exist. You want the best of both worlds with speed, optimized code, optimized hardware, usability... all great things, yes. But if all of those things came in one package.... I SHUDDER to think of the price tag. I'm happy with my Core 2 Duo lappy for under $700. At $7k? ACK!
The Plus holds up very well with Word. I wonder how it does on Photoshop or 3D imaging. Maybe I shouid dust off my Mac Plus and cancel my order on an 8-core system. My dual G5 takes 12 hours to process some of my jobs.
Kickin' article. Agreed, there is no real 'heavy-lifting' comparison between the Plus and the Wintel; the Wintel is simply faster and more capable than the Mac. However, there is a whole sector of the population that doesn't give squat about whether you can render at 75fps or not (e.g, the better part of my family) - they want their computers to type, surf the internet (agreed, the Mac would have problems with this) and not break at the same time. Not Windows' specialty.One other thing in the Mac's defense. I still have a Mac SE lying around my house, which still works; my little sister plays Reader Rabbit and Kidpix on it all the time. This computer spent 8 years in storage in Connecticut, with no humidity or temperature - this means 100 degree heat/98% humidity in the summer, whole weeks below zero in the winter. It still works, boots as fast as it did fifteen years ago. Not to mention the fact that it was abused on and off by my brother and I when we were little. Best computer I've ever owned, hands down.
In many ways, this test actually favors the AMD in terms of user experience because of the most notorious source of modern day bloat: Preinstalled software. If you were to compare the Mac Plus as it came new from Apple and a new desktop machine from Dell (or HP to most any other retailer), I would bet money on the Mac Plus winning even more of those 17 tests. I find this relevent because the common user experience isn't from when they finish installing their OS; instead, it's from when they open up the box.
To take the selective statistics further... I can "boot" my pen and paper in less than 1 second... maybe this proves that productivity has gone backwards?
I run my own mix of fluxbox and ubuntu on a g4 iBook. In OS X time to load neo office is 32-120 seconds, word is 28-45 seconds, I boot into Linux and I can load Open office in between 4-15 seconds.
Software bloat is the single biggest problem out there.
And for more reasons than one... specifically... as we automate our machines more and more, we lose contact with what is going on. The CLI puts you in charge... i.e. in america you control the interface in soviet russia the interface controls you...yaddayaddayadda...
anyway... no one will ever listen to this... it is a point of religion...
but damn... I am glad I still activate programs from the command line...
ah well...
it is the american way to grow in resource use ... not to grow in efficiency.
btw:
from the comments I think almost all the posters... just didn't get it.
So... what you should do is demonstrate the productivity of a secretary who uses worperfect with the cardboard navigation key guide... on an old 8086... versus a modern secretary using a mouse driven version of the newest word.
Maybe then it will sink in that this is...
A. humorous
B. half funny and half sadly true.
On my XP machine, when I went to your URL:
1) McAfee scanned your page for me automatically for like a gazillion known viruses and such.
2) Steam is checking which of my buddies on the Internet are coming online in case I want to join them in a game.
3) Answers.com utility is waiting for my key-click combo to tell me what an unknown word on your page means.
4) My UPS utility is communicating with my UPS to keep my system ready should the power go out.
5) Bluetooth is scanning the airwaves ready to automatically connect my wireless devices.
6) The task manager is monitoring my system performance for me so I can check at any time.
7) The print utility is waiting for the next job from my computer or one of the other ones on the home network.
8) VMWare is running Ubunutu Linux in the background so I can listen to music as I wish because I like the Linux music players better.
9) VMWare is running Windows 2000 in the background with a VPN connection to work (traffic separation scheme) so I can jump on an issue immediately with the software I write for customers.
10) Smartison is waiting for me to capture a screenshot which I tend to do often enough to warrant keeping it running.
11) Google Updater is making sure software packages are up to date.
I do agree with the posters that mentioned XP and newer software is bloated.... a lot of the reason is, is that there aren't very many real "programmers" anymore.
Everything has moved away from "let's program this right" to "let's program this so it works good enough... if it uses way too many resources who cares... we'll just tell the users that their system is outdated and needs to be upgraded/replaced"
Can everybody say "thank you" to interpreted languages like Java and .Net, etc?
with the latest technological advancements on computer products, storage areas and such, as a programmer, even i dont care much if my program can run faster or smoother, cus usally my dual core opteron or my clients core2duo processor (or even pentium4) can handle the jobs i've given without any slow down or such. i belive that most of the games in the market that requieres high end pc's can run on a normal system with better programming (which requires MUCH more time and MUCH more investment of course, i dont blame them for not doin that).
This comparison leaves me wondering what the difference would be between a truly modern OS - say one of the *BSD's or Linux (or even Solaris) - and the classic Mac? I'm certain the Mac would still win - after all, no 'PC' OS can compete with MacOS (if just for reasons of hardware support) - but I've run Linux on 500Mhz P2 boxes with 256M of ram that were barely able to handle Win95. (and have had uptimes of months (years, if I'd had a UPS on them) compared to the average of 7 hours with Win95)
But the fact is that the PC will always be slower in some features than a Mac. Probably the biggest reason is the hardware - MacOS only has to support a limited amount of (core) hardware. What I mean is: when you look at a Mac there are only a very small number of processors and mainboard chipsets that need to be supported, so the number of workarounds needed to make the hardware boot is tiny. The other thing is that Apple (used to?) require that all hardware meet exacting specs - this way it could be *guaranteed* to support whatever model of hardware discovery that MacOS uses. In a PC you have to be very careful about how you find the hardware - in some older (ISA (almost non-existant, now)) systems just sending a signal to an extension slot to see if something was plugged into it could cause the whole system to freeze. In addition, the sheer number and variety of processors and mainboard chipsets that might be found in a PC is staggering, and each has its own quirks - meaning that you have to have different code to handle two chips and chipsets that would otherwise be identical. The Macintosh has *none* of that diversity - even to this day.
I think a more useful comparsion would of been to compare a modern mac with an older mac running more or less the same software. Even though the OS would now be different at least it would of been more or less comparing apples to apples ... hehe.. I guess my ibook must be getting pretty old running the latest version of os x cause it sure seems like it takes 5 to 10 minutes just to reboot the darn thing after doing updates. My AMD dual core or even one of my P4's or PIII's running xp pro reboots a hell of a lot faster.
I hated so much my SE 30, it was too fast for playing ShufflePuck Café!!!!
I find it pretty amusing that most people miss the point. The average office user even today doesn't really do anything that requires massive computer performance.
The funny bit is when bringing up multimedia is that if you were serious about music and such back in the day, you'd likely be using a Mac, Atari ST, or something other than a PC, since the XT's and AT's weren't quite there yet with sound.
On a side-thought, i think the PC gained it's dominance over the Mac for some pretty strange reasons. For businesses who always penny-pinch a PC was just cheaper up front, and then for some reason games never really took off on Mac. Perhaps Windows saving grace was that an entire generation grew up playing games on their parents "productivity PC's".
Zero advance in productivity?? What a joke. How about do a real life productivity experiment? Give these computers to some secretaries. Ask them to do thier work and find out which is faster and better.
First off, my thanks to Hal Licino for an excellent *pragmatic* view of how much our technology, for all its changes, really hasn’t necessarily changed all that much.
Since Hal has admitted to being overloaded, I'll volunteer a few of my own comments on highlights from the responses (yes, I read them all):
From - cosinezero
"Interesting, but moot. Your 4MB mac would crawl to a halt with any non-trivial office document."
Very true, but the productivity question here is: *how often do we generate trivial versus non-trivial Office documents?*
Applying the Pareto Principle, 80% of our Word documents are going to be trivial, probably 1 to 4 pages. They're not going to have tons of fancy shit embedded in them and so forth.
Similarly, tasks like a "mail merge", I do have to admit that in 25+ years of business operations (20+ years with desktop computing), I've never had the need to do one, nor has anyone else in my office. As such, while it may very well be a fairly common task in some offices, it isn't necessarily a clearly universal task that everyone must do every week. As such, the Pareto Principle (80-20 Rule) again applies.
From - What a moron says
"You're essentially comparing a light sedan to a semi truck."
Exactly correct, and 80% of the time, one can successfully commute to work in merely a sedan instead of needing to use a big truck (insert derrogatory political comment about the wastefulness of SUV's here).
From - Anonymous
"Certainly, an interesting article, but in the end one that has no relevance. How can you say that you can do the same things on Word from 1987 and Word from 2007? Can you import and embed truecolor images into Word from 1987? How about pull info from a database? Mail merge? Anything many people do on a day to day basis?"
The answer is the same as what I said above to cosinezero:
Very true, but the productivity question here is: *how often do we generate trivial versus non-trivial Office documents?* The key issue is that when proverbially 80% of your doc's are trivial, then the more capable 'high end' system isn't going to provide you any productivity gain.
From - Gabriel Rossetto
"But really, talking about "common office tasks" and not having ANY email/connectivity tests is absolutely insane. This is a HUGE productivity booster anyway you look at it."
Fortunately for you, I can recall doing email on a Mac Plus. It wasn't really all that different from today. The software was VersaTerm Pro (a VT100 emulator), which hooked up via a 9600 baud connection to a Unix mail host. Those were the days of much better *email* productivity than today, because all of the email you got was actually important. And because it was "hard" to transmit binaries (uuencode/uudecode), you didn't have your time (or quota) wasted because some "helpful" person CC'ed you on all six revisions of the Powerpoint that they were working on. As such, there was a lot less *productivity time* wasted on stupid stuff.
From - Krenn
"One thing to note - in a lot of these tests, if you increase the size of the documents by a factor of 10 or even 100, the PC won't be very much slower, while the Mac will slow to a crawl."
Correct. Unforunately, people write a lot more 1-2 page documents than they write 10-20 page documents or even 100-200 page documents, and we need to take into account the mix of products to see how our time is being used. The Pareto Principle says that 80% of the time, the latter's better productivity on the "big project" does not have a significant impact on the productivity in day-to-day operations.
Krenn, continuing:
"And the 640-cell Excel spreadsheet seems on the small side; I regularly use 10,000-cell spreadsheets with ease. As an example - I have a spreadsheet that's about 1400 rows (a list of books, authors, ISBN, etc.)."
That is actually a database and a perfect example of how technology has allowed people to use the wrong tool for the job.
Maybe you could volunteer to set an "Access vs HyperCard" comparison? ;-)
From - zwouth
"I find it pretty amusing that most people miss the point. The average office user even today doesn't really do anything that requires massive computer performance."
You sir, are absolutely correct.
For anyone who doubts this wisdom, I invite them to go through their own email's in-box and sort the contents by size: you'll find that 90% of the stuff that's >50kb is this size because it has a binary file attached, and that 90% of all of the emails will have a text portion that is less than 3 printed pages.
My thanks again to Hal Licino for an excellent *pragmatic* view of how much our technology, for all its changes, really hasn’t necessarily changed all that much.
-hh
Thankyou for the entertaining article. I do however, feel the need to point out all the measurements are user response times. For example, scrolling take a fixed amount of time not because of the speed of the computer. If the programmer wanted to they could make the page scroll so fast, your monitor would never have a change to update the frame. Rather instead, there are deliberate delays added, to make the computer more usable. In some cases there is a litteral sleep(1), telling the computer to wait one second, but more often the delay is added in more obscure ways. Even an old Vic20 was fast enough that it needed to have a delay in the code to keep from scrolling too fast.
Type delay is another good example. It turns out the average person can not distinguish the difference between a type delays less than 0.2 seconds. In fact to some people having a delay significantly less than 0.2 seconds will make the letter appear before their mind has registered they have typed the letter, throwing off their typing rhythm. So any good programmer, tries to make the typing lag about 0.2 seconds.
So as you can see, when interacting with us slow humans, computers need to stop and wait. Where things have improved significantly, is when a vic20 stopped to wait before echo a character litterally just stopped and waited. However, modern computers rarely actually stop and wait for anything. While you are waiting the 0.2 seconds for your character to appear on the screen, they can do something semi-usefull like check if you have new e-mail.
Bill
Certainly an informative article.
I didn't have time to read all the great comments, so someone may have touched upon this already. At any rate, I feel that the title should at least have "Microsoft Windows" somewhere before or after AMD Dual Core. With the title as is, it sounds like finger pointing at AMD as the root cause of the 'lack of productivity'
Really, you can put a much less bloated OS (such as "Damn Small Linux", etc etc) on there, and get some time boot/load time etc. sliced off the AMD PC.
Your test is unfair - to the McPlus: the savvy user would have been using WriteNow, much faster than juggernaut Word, or else the earlier MacWrite - the earliest MacWrite was RAM-based & presumably faster still. And let's get back to system 3.2, when you could have the system, word processor, and the book you were writing all on one floppy disk - and get on with writing it because you werent wasting your time posting comments on the net.
It is like comparing a Model-T to a modern Ferrari by having them both drive through city traffic.I still have an Apple IIc that will blow the doors off any of the above, as long as you don't want to actually see any graphics.It is a cute demonstration, but it is a moot point. I suppose what puzzles me is that the results of this test would be in any way une
Marek Sumara says:
12 months ago
:) I do enjoy these sort of articles, as they remind us of the essential nature of the user experience and computers. More Gee-Whiz is fine, but productivity definitely takes a hit. I'm a total Apple activist, but even I would be interested in seeing this comparison run again with a new Mac Pro / iMac / MacMini just for the heck of it.