Re: What has changed in the Apple world last 6 months?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3a2fd875@news.svn.net>, Paul Grammens <grammens@svn.net> wrote:
 
> Paul Schlyter <pausch@saaf.se> wrote
>
>> Why?  These old Apple's had enough CPU power needed by many
>> businesses.  The extra CPU power in modern computers is mostly used
>> for "visual sugar" (pretty-looking GUI's etc), without adding any
>> real content.  Or for idle cycles....
> 
> Nope. For example, I've worked on the computers in a couple of local vet
> offices. Their DOS based vet software packages and data are over 50 megs.
> Imagine how long it would take to do daily backups on an Apple II.  Then
> there is the issue of reliability and parts availability...
> Sorry, I disagree with you.
 
You're talking about storage space, not CPU power.....  <g>
 
But of course the Apple II is hopelessly inadequate for an
application using a 50 Meg database; however many (most?) businesses
don't need such large databases.  Remember that most businesses are
small businesses...
 
And even applications using 50 Meg databases only require a fairly
small part of the CPU cycles on the machine it's running (unless it's
a quite old, "hopelessly slow", machine, say a 12-year old 386 with
"only" a few hundred MBytes of disk space).  Most computer users have
simply gotten used to wasting CPU cycles all the time.  Consider for
instance the popular distributed application seti@home which many
people have running on their computers, converting most of their
computer's idle cycles into something useful -- they think.  But are
they, really?  The seti@home software is typically running as a
"screen saver", drawing a pretty figure on the screen while it's
crunching data to try to find some patterns among received radio
signals.  The software has an option of disabling that pretty-looking
display -- doing this will increase the throughput by a factor of 5
or so.  Yet, most users prefer to run seti@hime with the screen
display enabled.  This common behaviour show their priorities: they
prefer a pretty-looking computer screen on ther desk over using their
CPU cycles to something actually potentially useful.
 
Finally, I wonder how efficient regarding usage of disk space those
50+ Meg databases you referred to were.  I mean, it's just as easy
to waste disk space as it is to waste CPU cycles....

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Grev Turegatan 40,  S-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at saaf dot se   or    paul.schlyter at ausys dot se
WWW:     http://hotel04.ausys.se/pausch    http://welcome.to/pausch