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?Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that’s not considered thoroughly here, like just how much more crazy stuff you can do on computers. Try running any 3D application on a Mac Plus, and see how far you’ll get. Or play an MP3 or open a JPG; uncompressing data takes cycles, and today's machines will play a dozen compressed songs and movies simultaneously while you edit your MS Word documents. But the point the author is trying to make is valid - is software so advanced “under the hood” from 20 years ago that we should tolerate it operating at the same or worse speed as twenty years ago?
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. (full article) (tokyopia)
"I can see you happy in the shadows I despise..."
Dude, that article is sad. First, some select quotes:
ReplyDelete"There was no point running PCMark or Sandra Sisoft-type benchmarks on the two computers as the AMD would have the Mac for lunch"
"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."
"We thought that surfing the net on a b&w 9” screen would be a bit of a bummer, so we skipped it."
"But we just couldn't bring ourselves to run the earlier and hopelessly buggy versions."
Now come the next questions. 1) Did they install any system extensions? I bet they didn't. How many System Extensions did *you* use with System 6? Were there more than one row of icons displayed? A vanilla System 6 system is ludicrous - much more so than a vanilla XP system is.
2) Did they set how much RAM Microsoft Word was allowed *before* timing it? Because a more reasonable test is to open Word, attempt to open a document, fail, close Word, Hit Apple-I to change how much RAM was assigned to the app (since the OS did no memory managment whatsoever), open Word, open the document, rinse and repeat as needed.
3) When was the last time you (or anybody else you know) worked with only one application open? That's a ridiculous test. In the real world people cut and paste between Word, Excel, and a browser of their choice. To pretend that isn't an advance in usability is absurd.
I'm not saying there aren't bloat in current OS'es, but I *AM* saying that this article is so biased as to be laughable. OS 6 is technically comparable to Windows 3.1, not even Windows 95, much less Windows XP. (No pre-emptive multitasking, no real memory management to speak of.)
I don't think it was trying to be biased. I think it was trying to make a point; though I think it might have been neater if they'd done the same tests on an old Mac and a new Mac, rather than turning it into a Windows/Mac thing, which in reality it is not. (Maybe it /is/ in their heads, though) They would have had similar results if they'd used a DOS machine and a DOS version of Word; maybe similar results even if they'd used early Windows 3.1.
ReplyDeleteIs MacOS 6 really comparable to Windows 3.1?
The basic point to me remains valid; in common use cases, we have staggeringly faster machines that are not noticeably operating staggeringly faster than older machines.
Yeah, in a lot of ways any Mac OS prior to OS X is comparable to Windows 3.1 It was well beyond Microsoft in 1984, but it didn't age well.
ReplyDeleteI think the point is that it's glib (and incorrect) to assume the "common use case" has remained the same. If he took screenshots of the two different "tests" you wouldn't even recognize them as the same application. A typewriter uses even less RAM and CPU so I think it's just a valid to compare a typewriter and a Word 2007 and rail about bloat.
Heh. Did they use "Multifinder" in their tests? Looks like it wasn't integrated until System 7. Waving one's hand and saying "Nobody needs multitasking, background processing, always-on interent, etc. etc." is silly.