Re: Apple and the Holy War

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

>Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:
> 
>> pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter) wrote:
>> 
>>>> I did a series of tests in the past decompressing zip files,
>>>> jpg files, and running GUIs on a 640x200 resolution screen.
>>>> The IIGS crushed the 4.77Mhz 8086 XT and the 10Mhz
>>>> Turbo XT too.  It ran the GUI faster than an 8Mhz AT and
>>>> unzipping files and converting JPGs were about the same
>>>> (and way faster than on the Turbo XT).
>>> 
>>> None of these are floating-point intensive programs though.
>> 
>> True.  But back in those days, few programs actually made
>> extensive use of floating point operations.  This was before
>> the days of Quake.  Way before.
> 
>There were etensive floating-point computations before Quake!
>Why do you think e.g. the ENIAC (the very first electronic
>computer) was built?  That's right -- to perform floating-point
>operations, so people wouldn't have to do it by hand....  The
>ENIAC was slower than a good picket calculator today btw, but it
>still made economical sense to dedicate a whole room plus a staff
>of technicians, because otherwise you would have to hire,
>and pay salary to, (human) computers to do the computations.

Obviously you would have need for some floating point
performance, but you miss my point.  Back in the olden
days of computing, the task most people used the
computer for was word processing.  Look back at any
computer magazine or history book or ask anyone who
used a computer in that era.  You may have had a
special need for high performance floating point at that
time and if so, good for you.  Even on the Apple II, you
could have plugged in your 68881 (or 68882) math
coprocessor card and away you went.  But the fact of
the matter is the majority of PC users did not plug a
math coprocessor into the socket even though their
PC had one.  You can thumb through some old issues
of computer magazines of the era to prove this to
yourself.  Remember all those reader survey cards in
those magazines?  I read the survey results back in
those days and there were more folks with MODEMS
than with MATH CHIPS.  Modems also costed a lot but
they offered a capability that most people would find
more use for AT THE TIME than math chips.
 
>Some 100 years ago, the word "computer" was in the English language,
>but it did mean something else than today: back then, a "computer"
>was a person hired to do computations all day long, usually by hand,
>later with a desk calculator as an aid.

It still does not change the fact that the original IBM
PC 4.77Mhz without math coprocessor chip could
run text based Wordstar slower than an Apple II could
run AppleWorks.  I know this for a fact because I
typed on a friend's PC with Wordstar and my IIe with
AppleWorks was just more efficient.  Interestingly, so
was the IIe version of WordPerfect.  When my friend
switched from Wordstar to the DOS version of
Wordperfect, performance slowed down.
 
>> Most people did word processing, painting, spreadsheets,
>> databases, and terminal emulation back then.
> 
>That was later -- in the really early days of computers,
>most people involved with computers did computations.  Only
>later did computers get cheap enough to make it feasible to
>toy around with them too.

Ok.  Then the Athlon would be a gem for you.  Or
maybe the G4 PowerMac would be better actually.  The
FPU performance of the G4 is what is really still very
competitive about the chip.  This might be why a 500Mhz
G4 can match or best a 1Ghz Athlon in Photoshop.  Of
course in most other tasks that involve more integer
operations, the Athlon will kill the G4.

So what do you want?  Back in my IIe days, I can
honestly say that the IIe was a much better computer
for me because it was a much better word processor
and the AppeWorks/IIe combination was much much
more efficient to me than the WordStar or WordPerfect
plus IBM PC combination.

Today, of course no Apple II can match a 1Ghz Athlon
PC, but I can make the distinction.  The Apple II was
better for me in 1984 than the IBM PC.  The Athlon PC
is better for me today than a PowerMac.  Case close.

Apples versus PCs.  It is not one or the other for me.
Simply what works at the time.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but mine is that
in those days, the Apple II was far better than the
IBM PC, XT, or even AT (AT in relation to the IIGS).
Today, I'd go for an AMD based PC over a Mac in a
second.
 
>> In my opinion, in those days, integer performance was far
>> more important.
> 
>You're of course entitled to your opinion....
> 
>BTW did you ever benchmark an RSA computation on the Apple II ?
>(is there even such software for the II ?)  Yes, RSA is done
>by integer modular arithmetic, using very long integers.
> 
>Aaah, I see ... you mean only short integers, no longer than
>16 bits -- right?

Sorry, I use my computers for practical things.  I am
not a hacker or a programmer but your average
computer user.  If this is reason for you to look down
on the rest of us, fine.  But face it, the majority of
computer users are application users, right?  Again,
this is the reason why I found the Apple II to be better
in the 1980s.  This is the reason why I find the PC
to be better than the Mac today.
 
>>>> In my tests, the XT and AT were not equipped with math
>>>> coprocessor chips.  They were not standard equipment
>>>> back in those days.
>>> 
>>> They were standard options though: all PC's were equipped with a
>>> socket for the 80x87.  If you wanted it, all you had to do was to buy
>>> the chip and plug it in to that empty socket.
>> 
>> True, but none of the PC owning friends I knew back then
>> had the FPU chip.
> 
>This says something about your friends.... :-)

Word processing mostly.  BBS hopping later on.  Data
bases and spreadsheets too.  FPU may have helped in
the latter, but word processing was really king back
then.  Even today, I am pretty sure wp is second only
to internet as the main use of computers.
 
>> They were extremely expensive options back then.
> 
>They weren't cheap, sure, but they weren't "extremely" expensive
>either!  You could have one for perhaps 10-15% of the cost of the
>entire computer -- that's not much if FP performance is essential to
>you.  And if FP performance is so unessential to you that you never
>would pay extra for an FPU, then you might as well keep your old
>8-bit computer.  For non-FPU related tasks, my first 4.77 MHz 8088 PC
>was outperformed by my old 6 MHz CP/M machine: the CP/M machine had
>both a faster CPU and bigger floppy disks (640K on the CP/M machine
>vs 360K on the PC; at that time I had no harddisk on my PC).  The
>PC then had only one advantage: meomory space (640K RAM on the PC
>vs 64K on the CP/M machine), which sometimes mattered.

And this was exactly why I stayed with the Apple II.  ;-)

I didn't move to the PC until the advent of Windows 95 and
the '486 and when I moved over, the main thing I did was
still word processing and page layout.  The internet was
what caused me to jump ship, but I still have my IIGS and
still use it to word process and page layout sometimes.  I
have a library of TrueType fonts on a hybrid Mac/Windows
CD-ROM that's installed on both my IIGS and my PC and
both are connected to one high resolution ink-jet printer.
Both computers have Zip drives.  I word process and type
using the same set of fonts on both computers and print
to the same printer.  The output is identical.

I keep the IIGS because sometimes, the PC is in use
and I can have an extra word processing station.

If FPU performance was essential to me, I would most
likely have switched sooner or at least gotten an FPU
card for the IIGS.
 
>> Buying the chip was as expensive on the PC as buying an FPU card
>> for the IIGS.
> 
>Can you quote some prices?
> 
>BTW when I got my first PC, in 1986, I had dreamt about the 8087
>for several years, but I had not yet heard about the IIgs.

You were probably out of the loop at that time.  In the
United States and Canada (I was up north at the time),
the IIGS was big news.  Apple had a brief Apple II spirit
and the IIGS was released with some fanfare.  I was
hooked on the IIGS from then on.  Still am.  ;-)  On all
the newstands in November of 1986, there were big
pictures of the IIGS.

Pretty amazing machine.  I can convert an entire MP3
from my PC, drop it onto a Zip disk, load it up to the
IIGS and play it out amplfied speakers on the IIGS to
this day.  Back in 1986, the PC had yet to get its first
4-voice soundblaster (the first version).  Between the
Ensoniq and the 8087, I would rather have the Ensoniq.

BTW, I was enough interested in the PC world to get
the PC Transporter, an 80186 compatible (NEC V30)
co-processor card that allowed the IIGS to drop into
MS-DOS mode and even run Windows 3.0.  Running
at Turbo XT speeds and sporting an 8087 socket, I
was...not impressed.  Sorry, the DOS world sucked
at the time in terms of innovative media applications.

I'm like this today too.  Give me an Athlon and I want
to use that power to push media applications (games,
photo editing, and other creativity apps) not write
a bunch of computations for it to crunch in MathCAD.
You may be different and I see your point of view, but
I hope you see mine.
 
>>>> If you want to throw in the math coprocessor chips, then the IIGS
>>>> would need an FPU card (such as the Number Cruncher)
>>> 
>>> As I said above: on the PC you didn't need any "FPU card", you
>>> just had to plug in the FPU on that FPU socket which was available
>>> on all PC motherboards.
>> 
>> This is correct, but as I said before, it was expensive.
>> But the main point was that you have to compare non-FPU
>> equipment with non-FPU equipment and FPU equipment
>> with FPU equipment.  Otherwise, it would be like putting
>> a turbocharger in one model car and comparing it to
>> another model without turbocharger.
> 
>If so, you can hardly ever compare computers to one another, because
>they're always different.  Should you compare a computer with a HD
>to one without a HD?  Or one with color graphics to one without
>color graphics?  Et cetera et cetera....

Well, when computer magazines compare computers,
they put similar peripherals in them, do they not?
 
>Also: when you talk about the Apple II, you're always considering the
>IIgs, while I'm always thinking about the II+ since that's what I had.

Fair enough.  I had a IIe, then a IIGS.

>Getting a new IIgs was quite expensive.  Getting a new original IBM PC
>was of course equally expensive, so I never got one until the
>considerably cheaper clones did appear.
> 
>I would prefer the following terminology:
>
>Apple II:   the "classic" Apple II line:  the II, II+, IIe, IIc
> 
>Apple IIgs: the Apple IIgs, which really was a different computer,
>albeit with backwards compatibility to the classical Apple II's,
>much like today's Pentiums have backwards compatibility to the
>good ol' XT...
> 
>Could we agree on that?  If you mean the IIgs, please say so.

Yes, absolutely.  For me, the PC world evoved far enough
for me to consider jumping from the IIGS as a primary
computer at '486 Windows 95 stage.  If it was the IIe, I
would have jumped earlier.

But the IIe, the classic Apple II, I found better than the
classic PC (PC, XT, and AT).

If it was the classic PC and the IIe, I would probably jump
to the PC at the '386 Windows 3.1 stage, but would have
done so with OS/2 rather than Windows 3.1.
 
>>>> which patches into the SANE toolset,
>>> 
>>> Aaahhh --- SANE!  I always though SANE was quite insane - why?
>>> Because it added the overhead of function calls to f.p. computations.
>> 
>> True, but it lets all programs benefit from system
>> enhancements.  The PC world does this too.  Microsoft's
>> Direct3D has overhead too, but it allows many different
>> graphics cards to interface with software.  But video cards
>> that have the option of software that directly support them
>> will run faster with that software because there is no
>> overhead.  But Direct3D is not insane, now, is it?  Of
>> course not.
> 
>The Direct3D is a much more recent invention.....
> 
>Today the CPU performance of personal computers are so vastly larger
>than you can afford some inefficiencies.  Like SANE, or Direct3D, or
>Java.  Java is btw an interesting phenomenon: basically it's a
>revival of the old UCSD Pascal concept of portable object code for a
>pseudo-machine which is interpreted on each actual machine.  Back in
>the days of the Apple II and the Lisa, interpreting pseudo-code made
>the programs considerably slower (that's why the Apple II+ with
>Applesoft outperformed the Lisa with Lisa Pascal, for instance: the
>interpretation overhead in Lisa Pascal was too big).  Nowadays
>interpreting pseudo-code can still be reasonably fast, because
>there are so many clock cycles available in today's processors.
>So there we are: there is at least ONE good use for those 1 GHz
>CPU's of today....
> 
>Anyway, Direct3D is a compromise.  If you really want the best
>performance out of your graphics card, you should of course avoid
>Direct3D and instead use a driver specific to your graphics card.

Absolutely.  My point is to support both.  Then if you switch
cards or add new equipment, your game will still support the
newer 3D accelerator.  But you can have the maximum
performance of ones with specific support.  This is why I
say SANE is NOT insane.  Actually, the main IIGS math
programs like GS Symbolix and GS Numerics both supported
the Motorolla co-processor cards directly, but it is nice that
SANE exists so that other programs can take advantage
of the card.
 
>>> If you want maximum performance form your FPU, you should of course
>>> use a compiler which generates FPU instructions inline.  In that way
>>> you'll avoid the overhead of library function calls, and will be able
>>> to boost the performance by a factor of perhaps 2 to 3.  "But what if
>>> the FPU is missing?", I hear you ask.  On the PC this would generate
>>> a trap, which was handled by an FPU emulation library which mimiced
>>> the FPU in software.
>> 
>> Orca C can generate FPU instructions inline.  Thus,
>> programs written specifically with the option of supporting
>> an FPU card on the IIGS will run faster.  Examples
>> include the math programs like GS Symbolix and
>> GS Numerics.
> 
>But here you're again talking about the IIgs rather than the II .....
> 
>There were FPU cards for the II too -- but those I was only did
>single-precision floating-point arithmetic.

Ok, I'll make the distinction.  You are right.  Back in the IIe
days, I wanted to find a program that would directly access
the 8087 on the PC Transporter (Turbo XT emulator card for
the II).  But on the IIGS, I had the option of using a Motorolla
based FPU card sporting the same FPU used in the Mac LC.
If I could get the IIe to address the 8087, I would have
been more excited, but for the IIGS, I would have gone with
the standard Motorolla card.