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Re: Apple and the Holy War
In article <20000512003147.26506.00000873@ng-cf1.aol.com>,
Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:
> 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.
I positively DON'T think so!!! Back in the days of the Mark I and
II, the ENIAC, the IBM 701 (which was made famous because it was the
first computer with a compiler for a high-level language available:
FORTRAN I, bakc in 1957), the UNIVAC, and others, CPU cycles were
considered far too expensive to waste on word processing. Time
sharing didn't exist, and only sysops had interactive terminals
available -- all others had to hand in a deck of punched cards for
batch processing. Computer-related texts, such as program listings
and data files, were edited using punched cards and/or paper tape.
Non-computer related texts were created with typewriters, without
any computers involved at all!
I've seen this evolution with my own eyes.
Back in 1976 I remember a card punching room at a computer center: it
had three card punch machines, and (except at odd hours) you would
usually have to wait 5-10 minutes, sometimes more, for your turn to
punch your cards. Eight years later, in 1984, that same room had one
single card punch machine, and it was rarely used by anyone. That
same year the secretaries got their typewrites replaced by computers
running word processing software -- I think they got Apple IIe's with
Appleworks....
----------------------------------------------------------------------
BTW do you know why the ASCII character DEL has the code 7Fh ?
That's all seven bits set. Why not instead some control character in
the range 00h to 1Fh ? The reason is very physical: another early
popular storage medium was paper tape: a long strip of paper with
holes punched in it. Except for a narrow line of "clock holes", the
paper tape didn't have any holes at the beginning. So you "write" at
the paper tape by punching holes in it: a line of 7 holes formed one
ASCII character: hole = a "one" bit, no hole = a "zero" bit.
Now, what happened if you mistyped a character - how would you
correct that? Well, it's kind'a hard do undo a punched hole in a
piece of paper. So all you could do was to punch all 7 holes at that
position: if all 7 holes were punched, this meant that character had
been rubbed out, and the paper tape reader software should ignore
this character. That's why DEL, aka RUBOUT, has the ASCII code 7Fh.
But what happens if you, when punching the paper tape, by mistake
skips a position? Then there will be no holes at all at that position,
and the paper tape reading software should ignore such a character
too. That's the origin of the ASCII NUL character: 00h.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Now we're talking computer history here, and compared to this the
microcomputer revolution in the 1980'es is a relatively recent
phenomenon. But we could go back even further, to the invention of
the punched card. This happened well before the computer era, some
time in the 1870's and 1880's. The inventor was Hermann Hollerith,
and these punched cards were used as a data storage medium for the
first population counting in the US at this time. These cards were
then read by mechanical devices which also were able to do some
simple arithmetic, such as addition. In that way, statistics of the
US population was obtained more quickly than by hand calculation and
data recording. Later, Hermann Hollerith formed the company which
today is known as IBM.
> Look back at any computer magazine or history book or ask anyone
> who used a computer in that era.
Do we use different history books? :-)
> 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.
I could have added an 8087 card to my ALF 8088 card too.... however
these early FPU's consumed a lot of electricity, so I might have been
forced to upgrade my power supply too... It was better to switch to
a computer where the FPU was integrated into the computer. Which in
the late 1980'ies only gave you two alternatives really: either a PC
clone, or an expensive custom solution with very little software
support.
> 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.
No need to, I remember it all very well. Yet, the FPU socket WAS
THERE on every PC. Most did choose to ignore it, but for those who
wanted an FPU it was very easy to plug it in (and to flip the dip
switch which told the motherboard an FPU had been installed).
[ more rantings about users not using an FOU snipped ]
>>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.
Indeed, Wordstar was horribly slow. But if you had the patience, it
was also quite capable: Wordstar was able to edit a file one megabyte
or large, if you had enough free disk space (at least 3 times the
size of the file you wanted to edit) and if you had the patience
while it did its swapping to/from disk) -- and it did all this within
a 64K TPA !!!!!
Could you edit a 1 MByte file on AppleWorks?
> Interestingly, so was the IIe version of WordPerfect. When my friend
> switched from Wordstar to the DOS version of Wordperfect, performance
> slowed down.
Interesting -- I got the impression that WordPerfect performed better
than WordStar.....
>>> 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.
Any of today's FPU's are such beasts of performance and yield much
more processing power than I really need. The 66 MHz 486 contained
about the FPU performance I needed, and what's happened beyond that
is to me a luxury that I don't need. It's very nice if a program
runs in 10 seconds instead of 1 hour, but it's much less interesting
if it runs in 0.1 seconds than in 10 seconds.
> So what do you want?
Didn't I already explain in enough detail?
> 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.
I was never too fond of AppleWorks -- tried it once or twice, but
that's about it. Beyond playing games and poking around inside the
computer, I made CP/M the "serious" OS on my Apple II. My first use
of WordStar was on that Apple II as a CP/M machine, not on a PC.
And, yes, WordStar on the 4.77 MHz 8088 did indeed run slower than
on that 6 MHz Z80 on my Apple II.
> 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.
I got my first PC clone in 1986. I realized I had to make the
transition to 16-bit someday, and adding extra cards to my Apple II
wasn't a good option in the long run (yes, there was the "DTACK
grounded" 68K card for the Apple II, with its own 16-bit bus and its
own power supply, but that would have been kind of a "super" KIM-1 or
AIM-65, and I didn't want that). If I had been more wealthy, I could
have bought the IBM PC or even XT. Or the even more expensive Apple
Lisa. But I didn't have that money. Yes, there was the newly
released Apple Macintosh, with a whopping 128K of RAM (not too
impressive, since I had then just got an 128K RAM card for my Apple
II: it worked like 8 language cards in parallell). and in addition
the Mac was a very different computer: no expansion slots, a GUI-only
OS, almost no programming language.
There were also various x86 computers appearing. I felt attracted to
several of them: they were fairly cheap and had quite good
performance (or at least the ads claimed so). Yes, I would have to
build some stuff myself for them to work, but I didn't mind that. But
the more important question was: would they last? It turned out they
wouldn't -- a few years later most of them were gone and forgotten.
Then, in late 1985, the first PC clones appeared. For the first time
the PC got affordable. Yes, I would have to buy the motherboard, the
diskette units, the powerupply separately, and then find a cabinet
and assemble it all there. I did all that, and had quite a lot of
fun. The most exciting moment was when the motherboard was powered
for the very first time: would it work? Yes, it worked. I added a
new kind of card: a multifunction card containing serial/parallell
ports, floppy disk controller, and a battery backuped CMOS clock - it
all occupied only one slot instead of three or four slots. I was
even able to borrow that expensive 8087 from someone who had bought it
but didn't really need it: he never asked it back, and I still have
it.
I equipped that motherboard with "full memory" from the start: 640K
apperad as a lot compared to the 64K in my Apple II or the 128K in
the Macintosh: I reserved 360K as a RAM disk and put COMMAND.COM
there, so I never had to insert a "system diskette" after terminating
a program again. MS-DOS versions of WordStar and Turbo Pascal
behaved almost identically as the CP/M versions, so basically I had
my former environment immediately ported. And in Turbo Pascal I
suddenly had so much more memory: 64K for the source code in the
editor, 64K for the program code, 64K for the variables, as opposed
to some 40K for all three of these combined on the CP/M machine. The
only drawback was that non-FPU-related stuff was slower on the PC
than on the CP/M machine. Using that RAM disk helped speed up disk
accesses though.
This was 2 years before the IIgs was released. If Apple hadn't tried
to outdo the Apple II with the Mac in 1983-1988 but instead had
released a IIgs-like machine in, say, 1984 or 1985, I might have
upgraded along that path instead. But that didn't happen.
> 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.
Your mileage may vary....
>>> 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?
Right. And cryptography is entering more and more applications. How
would you, for instance, do business with your bank over the Internet
without strong encryption and authentication? Yep, this is an
application for ordinary users, and more and more ordinary users are
getting online for these kinds of practical applications -- there
are already hundreds of thousands of people here in Sweden doing this.
> 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.
...and yet the difference between a PC and a Mac today is smaller
than ever: both use GUI's, both are very capable and perform much
above the needs for the average user, both use compatible diskette
formats -- quite a contrast compared to 10-15 years ago, right?
>>> 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. ;-)
You mean the memory space issue didn't matter to you?
> 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
Here I think we have a clue to our different pserspectives: when I
say "Apple II", I'm always thinking of the Apple II+ or possibly IIe
or IIc. I've never used the IIgs, as a matter of fact I've never
even seen in in real life. This is probably because the IIgs
appeared years after I had abandoned the Apple II.
> 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.
For similar reasons I keep my old 386 and 486. The harddisk
on the good old 8088 did cease working though, so that particular
computer will probably never be used anymore.
> 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.
The introduction of the IIgs passed almost unnoticed here. I saw an
ad or two, and though, with some amazement "..are they still creating
new versions of the Apple II ???", but then I didn't think
much about it.
> 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.
Admitted, early PC's weren't that great for playing music,
they were intended for serious work... <g> And since
I already had a record player......
> 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.
Yep, you're a media person who wants entertainment.
>> 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.
I wouldn't want to run Windows on a 386, it's too slow. IMO
Windows requires at least a 486 to be enjoyable. My old
386 is today used as a plain DOS machine (mostly for Usenet
access), and my old 486 as a Win-3.11 machine.
However you can also skip all of that Wintel stuff and instead
run Linux -- performs well, even on a 386.
--
----------------------------------------------------------------
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