Osborne 1 vs. IPad 2 249
On Saturday we ran a story about the 30th Anniversary of the Osborne Computer, and today we have an amusing head-to-head: Osborne 1 vs the iPad 2.
StormDriver starts: "At first, they seem to belong in completely different weight categories. Osborne 1 is just under 11 kg, enough to pull your arm out of the socket, if you're a skinny geek. That's roughly 20 times more than an iPad, or about the same as whole suitcase of them But what about the processing power? Osbourne 1 was sporting a Z80 CPU, running at a stunning frequency of 4.0 MHz. You cannot compare the different architectures directly, but iPad's CPU is a dual core A5, clocked at up to 1 GHz. That's approximately three hundred times more, not counting in the vastly superior architecture. Z80 CPU was supported by whooping 64KB of system memory. Surprisingly, it was enough to run databases, word processors and complex, professional software. Today's iPad is equipped with 512MB of RAM (roughly one thousand times more), and some reviewers complain it's a bit on the low side."
Re:Old stuff improves. (Score:4, Informative)
I wanna see the Model T vs 2011 Kia Rio offroad challenge!!
How about the Model T vs 2003 Hummer offiroad challenge? [forbes.com]
Re:Not really surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Not exactly correct. Take wordstar for example and compare it to any modern program.
Fonts? Yea right you where lucky if the screen could display bold and italics.
Graphics? What?
Spell checker? It was a separate program you ran.
The good old days where not so go. Calcstar and Visicalc? Not bad but they are very limited to the dataset they can use. If you want Visicalc you can still run it on a new PC. It is really fast and very tiny.
Yes Wordstar could run in 64k. It could even handle very big docs but it did so by keeping them on disk. Do a search and replace on a large doc and you will learn patience. Yes it is so much nicer now to be a programmer. You can expect megabytes of free memory so you can put an entire document in memory at once and not worry about it. Customers do want to handle much larger datasets then they used to. Many graphical images are larger then the entire mass storage available on an a Micro from the 80s. Sound files are larger than the hard drives of the IBM XT and AT when they first shipped.
As someone that lived at the time and worked on those computers I can tell you that yes there where some great highly optimized programs back in the day. The thing is they where also feature limited. Today we are resource rich so we can put the effort into more features. With a good program every feature is there because someone wanted it or it solved a problem for the users.
Hey if you want to go back to the "good old days" you can grab the source to joe and add dot commands and printing.
Now I do agree with you in one area. Feature creep is a problem. Most people only use 10% of Microsoft Word or Excel. There are many times when I do wish that I could have a small fast spreadsheet or WordProcessor that loaded quickly and then went away just as quick. Mainly a spreadsheet. We are also missing Personal Information Managers. We have great databases but no really good tools for dealing with what I think of as list managers. Evernote isn't bad and frankly we are using universal search more and more to solve that issue.