“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,” Hal Licino writes for HubPages. “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 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,” Licino reports.
“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,” Licino reports. “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,” Licino reports.
“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,” Licino reports.
“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,” Licino reports. “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.”
Full article, with test results, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Have a Mac that can boot into Mac OS 9 (not running as Classic via Mac OS X)? It’s very, very snappy, but we’d never trade Mac OS X for it. Licino’s claim that “for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity,” is ridiculous to anyone who’s used both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (even just Exposé by itself is a big productivity boost). As for Windows, productivity has never been one its strong suits or main selling points.
I think the main point also here is that most office employees that are just imputting bookkeeping or basic information don’t know enough about computers to use most of the crap that MS has added to Windows or the great things Apple has added to Mac OS X. I can attest that most people have no clue (and don’t want to know about) what a great tool they have in front of them.
Macsweep – your friend is obviously brain dead.
I’m far more productive on OS 9 than I could ever be on OS X, and not just because it’s faster. The interface is STILL far more consistent and elegant, and it does everything I need it to – I edit videos, make DVDs, publish in InDesign 2, design and manage my web sites, surf the internet etc. Indeed, there are a few aps I really depend on that don’t have satisfactory equivalents in OS X (for example, QuickNailer is indespensible for generating the galleries for my web sites – it has features I depend on that no equivalent software for OS X has). It is frustrating when I come across a Flash file that requires version 8 or later – or a QuickTime 7 file – but I can live with that (and IE 5.1 stil works better with some sites than any OS X browser). So why the hell would I want to go to the trouble and expense of installing and learning OS X? Besides, I just can’t accept an OS that depends on file name extensions – that was the single biggest reason I went Mac in the first place! Unbelievably, we’ve now been downgraded to Windows-level functionality.
I’ve said it for years and YEARS and _Y_E_A_R_S…
Old tech that works, is GOOD tech.
Just because something is old, doesn’t mean you throw it away.
If all you’re doing is word processing, spreadsheets, email (using Eudora for example), and that sort of thing, the Mac Plus… In fact just about any 68k Mac may well suit all of your needs.
When you start needing to work in color, surf websites, retouch color images, then you’ve outgrown the limited utility.
Still, many people would be well suited by a forced weekend or week using 10 or 15 year old technology just so they can re-learn their “working with limited resources” chops.
The good news for people who groan at the thought of doing something like that… Is that Mini’s are still on sale for a tick under $600 and cast away (tube mostly) displays which will work with said Mini are plentiful as people upgrade to LCD displays. Only the profoundly destitute, people looking to recover ancient data, or gamers looking for a vintage game fix would ever need to consider a vintage Mac as a working machine.
But old machines can be useful. In fact I know a fellow who runs his web presence on an old Apple ][. How’s that for squeezing the last little bit of juice out of the core?
Hano
Interesting but ultimately pointless article. To listen to this guy, you’d think that the sum total of home computer tasks revolve around Word and Excel. That’s absurd. For his next project, he should compare a car and a bicycle to see which one starts faster.
“Tests” like these make Mac folks look like a bunch of too-much-time-on-their-hands idiots.
What’s the point? There is an obvious bias enough to fudge an results to make an outdated machine beat a modern one.
Any TI scientific calculator fans out there? I bet they could make one of those beat a Mac.
Running the Basilisk II emulator with system 8 on my win laptop and Word 5.1 boots in seconds.
I’ve still got a Mac Plus on the shelf, but I have to say, I never want to see that System Error message with the bomb icon, and the Restart or Resume button again. OS X Rocks!!
I’m sorry, but I REALLY have issues with this guys credibility. His 63 sec. Windoze boot time just doesn’t add up. After reading his article, I decided to check it myself. I took a typical AMD desktop PC (X2 3800, 512mb PC3200 x2, 80gb hdd, 2 DVD drives, LCD monitor, Onboard graphics and sound) and installed a clean hard drive and loaded my retail copy of Windoze XP Pro (non-OEM) and then loaded all drivers. Now, with a digital stopwatch, my time from pushing the power button to full desktop (all items on task bar completely loaded) was 34 sec. What the heck is taking his system 29 sec longer!!
And BTW, I’m a bit irritated that all the headlines referring to this article keep stating, “Ancient Apple MAC beats Dual Core AMD System”. This is a bunch of crap!! What we got is the older MAC OS beating Windoze, not necessarily AMD. The results could have easily been the same for a Core 2 Duo system. However, all the public is seeing is what is being stated in these articles and I’m sure there are some consumers that will NOT buy an AMD machine because of it. In my opinion, this is completely irresponsible journalism and if AMD’s share price is effected negatively, someone should have to answer for it.
For the record, I don’t promote MAC OS, Windoze OS, or even Linux. But I DO resent BS when it’s printed.
I agree that some of those old systems (well, mainly the Macs) were spectacularly well-designed and efficient – perhaps more than today’s.
However, I don’t think it follows that computers haven’t progressed. Try running a web browser on System 6.0.8, or downloading photos from your digital camera, or playing MP3s. It won’t be a good experience, if you even make it happen at all.
Software bloat is a problem, yes, but the other major problem is that media and component interconnect speeds (SATA, frontside bus, optical media, etc.) have not kept pace with the growing data capacity of RAM, hard disks, DVDs, and so on.
For example, a 1996 Performa had a 1.2 GB HD. Current entry-level iMacs come with a 160 GB drive, so that’s a 133x increase in just over 10 years. 1996-vintage basic consumer SCSI could do about 5 MB/sec. The iMac’s drive connection bus, which I’ll assume is a SATA/150 interface, is capable of 150 MB/sec, which is only a 30x increase. And that’s not even getting into whether the drive can really saturate all that bandwidth.
This accounts for why, even though computers have much more storage and processing power, it still takes much longer to do things like booting or installing a larger OS. There are bottlenecks.