🚀 go-pugleaf

spagiola@amy5.stanford.edu (Stefano P. Pagiola) writes:

>*** Irving Hofman ** writes
>> PC-Magazine recently compared the speed of a 486/50,
>> Sun, Next, Mac, etc and found that the 486/50 was the
>> fastest of the lot. They conducted benchtests by timing
>> certain processor intensive operations in
>> wordprocessors, spreadsheets, and desktop publishing
>> using the same programs on all platforms. It is quite
>> interesting reading.... 
>> 
>But at least in regard to the one comparison I was able to replicate  
>myself (scrolling WP on 486 vs NeXT) quite unreliable.  The 486/50  
>was in fact quite fast at scrolling WordPerfect, but no more so than  
>the NeXT (non-turbo).  Bearing in mind that the 486 was scrolling WP  
>(DOS version) in text mode (ie without showing actual text formatting  
>other than by color changes, and without displaying embedded  
>graphics) while the NeXT was scrolling fully-formatted text (font +  
>size changes) _and_ the embedded graphics, I was more impressed with  
>the NeXT.  
>Two caveats: 1. in both cases the initial run through the document  
>was in fact faster on the 486; once the entire document was in RAM,  
>there was no difference in scrolling speed.  2. for a fair test, you  
>need to use the scroll bar in the NeXT WP version; using the  
>line-at-a-time scroll arrows is very slow, about as slow as scrolling  
>by repeatedly hitting the down cursor key on the 486 rather than  
>holding it down.
>I couldn't judge how fair or accurate the tests of other programs and  
>other platforms were, for lack of direct experience or boxes to try  
>it on.

perhaps this would have more to do with the key-repeat rate on the 486 ??
also: a 486 running 32bit OS/2 2.0 programs is about 4 time faster on
integer code ( let alone floating point ) than the same machine under dos.
(ie: think about what you are actually measuring !!!)
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stuartw@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz

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