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From: mayer@rochester.UUCP (Jim Mayer)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Selecting a micro
Message-ID: <519@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 31-Jul-84 18:59:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.519
Posted: Tue Jul 31 18:59:30 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Aug-84 00:34:45 EDT
Sender: mayer@rochester.UUCP
Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept.
Lines: 72

From: Jim Mayer  
I am planning to buy a microcomputer for word processing and home
terminal use.  I am looking at either the Macintosh or one of the suped
up MS-DOS machines (Tandy 2000, AT&T PC, etc.).  If I get a MS-DOS
machine I will be running Microsoft's Word and (eventually) the
MS-Windows environment.  I have some questions about both sorts of
machine:

Macintosh problems:

	Programs take too long to load.  It should be possible to fix
	this when the 512k upgrades are available (at worst, run the
	current stuff out of a RAM disk) but I hate to take that much
	on faith.  I could also add a hard disk, but...

	I would be very upset if Apple came out with a decent hard disk
	interface that I couldn't upgrade to.  On the other hand, it
	should be possible to run a hard disk off of the serial line
	given remote buffering and a good protocol -- but no one seems
	to have done it yet.  If I was sure something would come out I
	would go ahead and buy, but I'm not, and so I'm worried.

	The characters in MacTerminal seem quite readable, but they are
	very small.  I worry about eye-strain if I had to look at them
	for a long time.  Does anyone have experience with using
	MacTerminal for extended periods?

	Since I plan to do serious work munging I would have to use the
	MS-Word program for the Mac.  What I've heard of it sounds
	fine, except for the copy protection which sounds completely
	unacceptable -- it doesn't even let you make a backup!  You can
	make all the copies you want, but have to stick the master disk
	in before you can use them (only once per session though).  I
	assume that the same nonsence also applies to copies on a hard
	disk.  Any thoughts?

MS-DOS problems:

	Speed -- Just how fast is an 8086?  How does really good 68000
	code (like the bitblt in the Mac ROM) compare with its 8086
	equivalents?  The 68000 has all those lovely registers, and the
	8086 is stuck with its 64k segment architecture.  Remember that
	I plan to run MS-Word, which does all its screen stuff with
	graphics, so speed really is important.

General questions:

	What are the differences between the 8086, 8086-2, and 80186
	processors?  I ran a very simple Basic benchmark on several
	machines and got the following results:

		defint a-z
		print time$
		s = 0
		for i = 1 to 10000
		s = s + 1
		next i
		print time$, s
		end

		IBM-PC:			26 seconds	(8088)
		Compaq Portable:	27 seconds	(8088)
		Tandy 2000:		11 seconds	(80186)
		AT&T PC:		12 seconds	(8086-2)

	I think all of the machines were running variants of the same
	Basic interpreter, so the test has some validity as a CPU
	benchmark.

-- Jim Mayer
(arpa) mayer@Rochester
(uucp) rochester!mayer