September 1, 2008 at 18:10Comparison of old Mac Plus (86) versus dual-core Athlone
- Transfer
If you think that Americans are getting fatter, take a close look at the operating system (OS) of your computer, which is working right now. It gets bigger and heavier with every update. We are in the third decade of PC development, and have we really developed so much?
Let's go back to the dawn of personal computers and take the good old Apple Macintosh Plus. Mac Plus is an icon of the 80s along with a coat hanger, long hair and Devo. It seems like we all had a little Mac, either in our college dorm room, on the top floor in the bedroom, or in our office on the desk. With its small 9-inch black and white screen and all-in-one packaging, the Mac Plus is a relic in the days of widescreen LCD monitors and dual / quad-core systems.
However, to run these works of art among modern PCs, we need to install one of the latest OS. And so, when we find ourselves in trouble. Most people today have either Windows XP or Vista on their personal computers. These operating systems are modern, have almost infinite potential and can run any modern software. With more functionality comes size.
Comparison
The usual “configuration” for Mac Plus is System 6.0.8. This is an OS that needs a “legitimate” minimum of 1 megabyte of RAM to provide multitasking, network connectivity, printing, WYSIWYG display of millions of colors, and also run a sufficient GUI. These are features that require at least 500 times more memory under Windows XP and 1000 times more memory under Windows Vista.
When we look at the requirements of the OS hard drive, we find similar discrepancies. System 6.0.8 requires 1 MB, Windows XP requires 1.5GB, Windows Vista 15GB. Yes, Vista needs 15,000 times more than System 6.0.8. In TXT, you can write 175,000 words per file in one megabyte, which is the size of System 6.0.8. This length is about two full-size novels. Windows Vista requires so much space on your hard drive where you can easily place 30,000 novels.
System 6.0.8 is not only much more compact in size because it has much fewer (mostly useless) functions and, therefore, less code to process, but also because it was written in assembler instead of the higher-level C language. Than the lower the language level, the fewer processing cycles are required to get what you need.
Mac Plus is a Motorola 68000 CPU that runs at 8MHz. AMD is an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with two cores, each running at 2.4GHz. In absolute terms, computing power is measured solely in the speed of the processor, AMD with its 4.8GHz is 600 times faster than Motorola. At the same time, AMD is much more advanced processor, in ordinary tests, it is much faster than the old 68000. Thus, we can safely say that AMD is at least 1000 times faster than the Mac Plus.
We decided to fortify by scoring the maximum possible 4MB RAM in the old Plus. In the end, he will fight against AMD with its 2 to 512MB RAM, for a total of 1024MB or 1GB. This is about 250 times more memory than a Mac.
The Mac was equipped with a 40MB external SCSI hard drive. AMD had an internal IDE for 120GB, i.e. 3,000 times the amount. Both discs were less than 10% full.
Tests
To reduce the cries of unfair comparisons, we have developed trials that should be fair and equal as much as possible. It didn't make sense to run PCMark or Sandra Sisoft-like programs because AMD would eat a Mac for lunch. We focused on tests that reflect how the user works on the computer. In the end, most users do not know or they don’t care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core processor or tiny wizards settled in the case. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it solves the tasks that we most often “ask” to do. And no, we do not include modern “heavy” software like Photoshop or Crysis! We chose very simple everyday functions that were performed in equal parts in the 1980s and 2007 Microsoft applications.
Since the tests involved both different computers and different versions of the software, it was important to develop tests that would have the same repeatability as possible.
1) Time was tracked by one person.
2) All tests were carried out on the latest and most effective OS configuration. For Mac Plus, it was System 6.0.8. For AMD - Windows XP Professional SP2.
3) All tests were carried out with the recommended amount of RAM.
For Mac Plus - 4MB.
For AMD - 1GB.
4) All tests were carried out on the original systems, so the hard drives were freshly formatted, the OS was just installed. No third-party software was outside the scope of standard Apple and Microsoft installations.
5) All tests were carried out with only one running application. Nothing but OS background tasks that are part of the standard OS installation was started. Computers were not connected to the Internet or local network.
6) All tests were measured with an accuracy of 0.1 second.
7) Each test was performed at least three times on each computer and the results were averaged.
The tests themselves went flawlessly. No computer crashed or malfunctioned in any way. They simply did what they wanted from them, regardless of the technological achievements (or lack thereof) inside the case.
We did not try web surfing because browsers that are supposed to work well on Mac Plus are Mozilla 1.2.1, Mozilla 1.3.1, and earlier versions of WannaBe and iCab. The idea of surfing the net on a 9 "b / w screen seemed silly to us, so we skipped surfing. However, some enthusiasts are still doing this!
(Yes, yes - dos browser steers - approx. translator)
Again, there were various ways, including Power R Video Driver Cable and various external gadgets that allowed you to connect all kinds of large external monitors to the Mac Plus. I remember how the huge 80-pound Ikegami 24-inch black-and-white monitors up and down the stairs, as they were the “favorite” screens for the late “compact” poppies like SE and SE / 30 in the literature departments (?) In the 90s . Photo - Hitachi 21-inch, which was the largest of those that I could find. Just imagine that Ikegami were even much bigger than this monster! I guess why I'm still tormented with my back!
We ran a variety of tests on two main applications. AMD - Word and Excel from Microsoft Office 2007. Mac Plus received Word 3.01 and Excel 1.5. Yes, we know that these versions were released one and two years later, respectively, after 1986 with Mac Plus. But we just couldn't run the early and hopelessly bad versions.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is the program most commonly used by people around the world. The tests that are of the greatest interest for everyday official and personal use of Word are the most basic of them: launching the application itself, “Search and Replace”, “Open file”, “insert”, “Save”, “scroll”, “print” and "Word count".
Microsoft Excel
In the case of Excel, we also focused on the most repetitive and common tasks. We chose: Launching the application, “Window placement”, “autoformatting”, “filling in the range”, cell editing, vertical scrolling, subtotals and Zoom Out. Most users use relatively small tables, so we used 640 filled cells.
Download time For
fun, we also included an estimate of the boot time in the list of tests, just to find out how long it takes to load the OS from pressing the Power button until the desktop is ready for use.
Conclusion
See the results! In the functions that people use most often, the vintage 1986 Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 +: 9 tests against 8! Out of 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53%! Including a shocking 52 second gap from AMD in terms of boot time.
We also do not want to put AMD in an awkward position, comparing the time required to install the OS with old Macs. The average Mac time of about a minute is negligible compared to approximately one hour of the installation time of Windows XP Pro.
So does this mean that the Mac Plus is better than our AMD? Of course not. Over the past (since Mac Plus), 21 years of technological progress has brought modern PCs to a whole new level of capabilities. But “user experience” (usability is a matter of translation.)hasn't changed much in two decades. Due to the bloated code, which includes hundreds of functions, which the average user does not even know exist, not to mention ever using, software companies have made our PCs more efficient by neutralizing their huge speed. When we compare common, daily, simple user tasks between Mac Plus and AMD, we see a remarkable similarity in overall speed, so it can be argued that for most simple office purposes, massive advances in technology over the past two decades have brought zero progress in labor productivity .
And this is just crazy.
Original here
Translated by nerfur Nerfur (direct exclusive exclusively for the Habr and the blog "Iron Nostalgia" ;-))
Let's go back to the dawn of personal computers and take the good old Apple Macintosh Plus. Mac Plus is an icon of the 80s along with a coat hanger, long hair and Devo. It seems like we all had a little Mac, either in our college dorm room, on the top floor in the bedroom, or in our office on the desk. With its small 9-inch black and white screen and all-in-one packaging, the Mac Plus is a relic in the days of widescreen LCD monitors and dual / quad-core systems.
However, to run these works of art among modern PCs, we need to install one of the latest OS. And so, when we find ourselves in trouble. Most people today have either Windows XP or Vista on their personal computers. These operating systems are modern, have almost infinite potential and can run any modern software. With more functionality comes size.
Comparison
The usual “configuration” for Mac Plus is System 6.0.8. This is an OS that needs a “legitimate” minimum of 1 megabyte of RAM to provide multitasking, network connectivity, printing, WYSIWYG display of millions of colors, and also run a sufficient GUI. These are features that require at least 500 times more memory under Windows XP and 1000 times more memory under Windows Vista.
When we look at the requirements of the OS hard drive, we find similar discrepancies. System 6.0.8 requires 1 MB, Windows XP requires 1.5GB, Windows Vista 15GB. Yes, Vista needs 15,000 times more than System 6.0.8. In TXT, you can write 175,000 words per file in one megabyte, which is the size of System 6.0.8. This length is about two full-size novels. Windows Vista requires so much space on your hard drive where you can easily place 30,000 novels.
System 6.0.8 is not only much more compact in size because it has much fewer (mostly useless) functions and, therefore, less code to process, but also because it was written in assembler instead of the higher-level C language. Than the lower the language level, the fewer processing cycles are required to get what you need.
Mac Plus is a Motorola 68000 CPU that runs at 8MHz. AMD is an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with two cores, each running at 2.4GHz. In absolute terms, computing power is measured solely in the speed of the processor, AMD with its 4.8GHz is 600 times faster than Motorola. At the same time, AMD is much more advanced processor, in ordinary tests, it is much faster than the old 68000. Thus, we can safely say that AMD is at least 1000 times faster than the Mac Plus.
We decided to fortify by scoring the maximum possible 4MB RAM in the old Plus. In the end, he will fight against AMD with its 2 to 512MB RAM, for a total of 1024MB or 1GB. This is about 250 times more memory than a Mac.
The Mac was equipped with a 40MB external SCSI hard drive. AMD had an internal IDE for 120GB, i.e. 3,000 times the amount. Both discs were less than 10% full.
Tests
To reduce the cries of unfair comparisons, we have developed trials that should be fair and equal as much as possible. It didn't make sense to run PCMark or Sandra Sisoft-like programs because AMD would eat a Mac for lunch. We focused on tests that reflect how the user works on the computer. In the end, most users do not know or they don’t care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core processor or tiny wizards settled in the case. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it solves the tasks that we most often “ask” to do. And no, we do not include modern “heavy” software like Photoshop or Crysis! We chose very simple everyday functions that were performed in equal parts in the 1980s and 2007 Microsoft applications.
Since the tests involved both different computers and different versions of the software, it was important to develop tests that would have the same repeatability as possible.
1) Time was tracked by one person.
2) All tests were carried out on the latest and most effective OS configuration. For Mac Plus, it was System 6.0.8. For AMD - Windows XP Professional SP2.
3) All tests were carried out with the recommended amount of RAM.
For Mac Plus - 4MB.
For AMD - 1GB.
4) All tests were carried out on the original systems, so the hard drives were freshly formatted, the OS was just installed. No third-party software was outside the scope of standard Apple and Microsoft installations.
5) All tests were carried out with only one running application. Nothing but OS background tasks that are part of the standard OS installation was started. Computers were not connected to the Internet or local network.
6) All tests were measured with an accuracy of 0.1 second.
7) Each test was performed at least three times on each computer and the results were averaged.
The tests themselves went flawlessly. No computer crashed or malfunctioned in any way. They simply did what they wanted from them, regardless of the technological achievements (or lack thereof) inside the case.
We did not try web surfing because browsers that are supposed to work well on Mac Plus are Mozilla 1.2.1, Mozilla 1.3.1, and earlier versions of WannaBe and iCab. The idea of surfing the net on a 9 "b / w screen seemed silly to us, so we skipped surfing. However, some enthusiasts are still doing this!
(Yes, yes - dos browser steers - approx. translator)
Again, there were various ways, including Power R Video Driver Cable and various external gadgets that allowed you to connect all kinds of large external monitors to the Mac Plus. I remember how the huge 80-pound Ikegami 24-inch black-and-white monitors up and down the stairs, as they were the “favorite” screens for the late “compact” poppies like SE and SE / 30 in the literature departments (?) In the 90s . Photo - Hitachi 21-inch, which was the largest of those that I could find. Just imagine that Ikegami were even much bigger than this monster! I guess why I'm still tormented with my back!
We ran a variety of tests on two main applications. AMD - Word and Excel from Microsoft Office 2007. Mac Plus received Word 3.01 and Excel 1.5. Yes, we know that these versions were released one and two years later, respectively, after 1986 with Mac Plus. But we just couldn't run the early and hopelessly bad versions.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is the program most commonly used by people around the world. The tests that are of the greatest interest for everyday official and personal use of Word are the most basic of them: launching the application itself, “Search and Replace”, “Open file”, “insert”, “Save”, “scroll”, “print” and "Word count".
Microsoft Excel
In the case of Excel, we also focused on the most repetitive and common tasks. We chose: Launching the application, “Window placement”, “autoformatting”, “filling in the range”, cell editing, vertical scrolling, subtotals and Zoom Out. Most users use relatively small tables, so we used 640 filled cells.
Download time For
fun, we also included an estimate of the boot time in the list of tests, just to find out how long it takes to load the OS from pressing the Power button until the desktop is ready for use.
Conclusion
See the results! In the functions that people use most often, the vintage 1986 Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 +: 9 tests against 8! Out of 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53%! Including a shocking 52 second gap from AMD in terms of boot time.
We also do not want to put AMD in an awkward position, comparing the time required to install the OS with old Macs. The average Mac time of about a minute is negligible compared to approximately one hour of the installation time of Windows XP Pro.
So does this mean that the Mac Plus is better than our AMD? Of course not. Over the past (since Mac Plus), 21 years of technological progress has brought modern PCs to a whole new level of capabilities. But “user experience” (usability is a matter of translation.)hasn't changed much in two decades. Due to the bloated code, which includes hundreds of functions, which the average user does not even know exist, not to mention ever using, software companies have made our PCs more efficient by neutralizing their huge speed. When we compare common, daily, simple user tasks between Mac Plus and AMD, we see a remarkable similarity in overall speed, so it can be argued that for most simple office purposes, massive advances in technology over the past two decades have brought zero progress in labor productivity .
And this is just crazy.
Original here
Translated by nerfur Nerfur (direct exclusive exclusively for the Habr and the blog "Iron Nostalgia" ;-))