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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

>Quick, without doing any research: What early 1980s computer was faster, the IBM PC or the Commodore 64?

ok, now slowly, do the calculation again... the IBM PC and 8088 was the beginning of the future. the Commodore 64 and 6502 was the tail end of the past. The 6502 caught on because it was a bargain price, but at that price it was severely hobbled in what it could do, space- and time-wise

could you write a small program for the commodore 64 that was faster? who cares, because you couldn't write a large program that was faster.

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> the IBM PC and 8088 was the beginning of the future.

The entry level IBM PC was 16KB, and the top-of-the-line model was 128KB.

> at that price it was severely hobbled in what it could do, space- and time-wise

Again, Commodore 64 had 64KB of RAM, more than the cheapest PC. It also had dedicated sound (SID) and video (VIC-II) chips which made it more performant when it comes to entertainment (i.e. video games).

Even though the C64 (1982-08-01) hit the market about a year after the IBM PC (1981-08-12), it outsold the IBM PC series in 1983 and 1984. At the end of 1985, the IBM PC series was only slightly ahead in total unit sales. Of course, the IBM PC XT came out in 1983 and the IBM PC AT in 1984 so they were higher end models while the C64 was the same model.

The original IBM XT (edit: corrected from 'IBM PC' which was an earlier model with even less RAM) only had 128 KByte RAM, that's not different from a C128, CPC128 or Speccy, and some 8-bit home computers could be upgraded to around 1 MByte too (which would have been prohibitively expensive in the early 80's, but technically possible).

And performance wise, bank switching on an 8-bit machine wasn't much more expensive than updating the segment register on an x86

The main advantage of "proper" 16 bit CPUs was the wider databus and ALU. But a wider ALU doesn't help all that much when it is held back by an 8-bit data bus (like the 8088).

Also obligatory: Amiga forever! :D

Actually, the first PC in 1981 had only 16KB of RAM. And it cost something like US$1500. It really wasn't an obvious choice.

Ah right, thanks for the correction, it was the IBM XT that started with 128 KBytes RAM. Totally forgot that this wasn't the first IBM PC :)

For most people the opposite was true. They couldn't write a large fast program on a PC because they couldn't afford to buy one.

The "genius" of IBM was to reinvent an updated version of S-100, stick an IBM badge and a "business" price tag on a backward and underspecified machine, and spend millions on marketing.

16-bit hardware and operating systems were already available in the S-100 space.

Between them IBM and MS traded performance for forced standardisation. This likely held back access to much better features - like higher reliability and multitasking - for a decade or so.

Except that clones appeared out of nowhere, dirt cheap and just as fast.

"Between them IBM and MS traded performance for forced standardisation"

Maybe I misunderstand, but for me it is a strange statement:

* IBM fought standardization: they initially released a PC compatible with nothing, even in their own product lines, and fought hard against any kind of clones - those that transformed the IBM-PC in a de-facto standard. They even tried with the PS/2 line to break compatibility for all third-party hardware extensions (the MCA bus that could be used only by paying royalties to IBM).

* Microsoft cared neither for performance (obviously) nor for standardization. They just fought to own the market. Their products became de-facto standards because MS worked hard to kill competition and real standards. They even theorized and practiced the "embrace extend extinguish" process to kill competing products by breaking standards.

But you could do a heck of a lot with a small program on those machines.

I still find it amazing that we have a lot more processing performance, RAM and disk space these days, and yet every new commercial Operating System version that comes out requires more resources than the last and yet delivers essentially the same results...

I dare you to boot into any GUI OS from 2013 and try not to shudder.

Then boot into a 2003 one and try not to shudder even harder.

Bonus points for Windows 95.

Shudder from awesomeness? Windows 2k is still peak Windows UI (the aesthetics might be subject to fashion cycles - still better than the lollipop look that was prelevant on Mac and WinXP shortly after, but the UX has gone into a slow downward spiral since then). Same is true for macOS, only that it reached its peak and following slow regression about a decade later).

Boot RISC-OS on a Raspberry Pi. That was a nice fast graphical OS even before the 90s.

Boots into Windows 7 (a 2009 OS) ... No shudder Boots into Windows XP (a 2001 OS) ... No shudder Boots into Windows 98 (a 1998 OS) ... No shudder Boots into Windows 95 (a 1995 OS) ... No shudder

Fires up the old Amiga 1200 and boots into Workbench 3.0 (a 1992 OS) ... No shudder

Fires up the even older Amiga 500 and boots into Workbench 1.3 (a 1988 OS) ... No shudder

Ok, that last one might have triggered a shudder if I'd left the original color settings in place :D

I would continue but I've just found my old Syndicate floppy disks for the A500, so I might be sometime...

I like more the 1.3 colours, easier for my darn eyes :-}

Now try booting Windows ME...

It looks nice but if it boots you should have bought a lottery ticket instead.

What is the shudder I should be expecting?

From a user experience point of view, Windows 2000 was absolutely awesome. An operating system should not get in your way and distract you from what you need to do the way Win 10 and 11 do.

Boot BeOS or QNX..

so, KDE 5 or KDE 3? Yeah, both are superior to even modern windows and mac UIs, what's the problem?

Has anything changed since 2013? 2003? Windows XP/ME/etc/.../95 was basically the same as modern windows just with boxier window decorations, no windows-phone-tile thing and less spyware.

In what way does those arguments change the calculation of which machine is faster to perform a specified operation?

It sounds more like you try to state that the results have no real world meaning, and that is very correct. But nobody have claimed otherwise. This is about historical computers. We all know which architecture won. Despite being slower performing a ROR.

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