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optimus2861
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Halifax, NS
Nov 2000
time: 01:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Solver
On a 512 MB RAM machine, say Windows starts with ~400 RAM free. Optimizing it at once gives ~470 RAM free. After hours of work, free RAM drops to under 200 MB, even if you have few apps running. Optimizing it then can give back up to 400-430 MB RAM. What's up? |
"Optimizing"? You mean a third-party "memory optimizing" software application?
Snake oil 
Windows was using the free memory as disk cache, in all likelihood (open up your task manager and look, it tells you how big a cache Windows is using). Those "optimizers" typically just ask Windows to give them a bunch of memory, which forces Windows to dump the cache, then release the memory again. So the next bunch of disk reads you have to do come from the disk itself, which is at least an order of magnitude slower than getting that info back from the cache. You're no further ahead in actual performance, it just makes the "free RAM" number go up.
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:29
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quote:
Maybe, even though I suspect the licenses cost money. The thing is that was the chance they had to increase market share, and to become a company more based on ideas instead of making things. |
It wasn't enough. Apple has never been a software company, even though it is best known for its software.
The mac clones, among other things, were causing Apple to haemorrhage money, and the clone makers didn't really add value to the Macintosh brand and caused Apple other problems.
Although people often claim that Apple should have licensed the Mac OS in the 80s, it wasn't really feasible technically or financially. The original mac was expensive and technically far in advance of the PC DOS machines it was competing with. People didn't want to pay that much for a computer, unless they were doing something that required the GUI.
There's a good article on this subject here:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/08/parlay
IBM wanted to licence NEXTStep in the late 80s, which was far superior to Windows at the time, but Jobs dicked them around and it probably wouldn't have taken off anyway. People used DOS because everyone else did - that made up for its suckfullness.
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:29
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quote:
If they never has been, they should have been. They could have made a whole bundle doing that in the '80s, or even in the '90s. |
The article I linked to explains why that was extremely unlikely. They probably would have gone out of business had they tried.
quote:
Not that more technially advanced. The Skinny Mac was based on the 68000 IIRC, which is a bit better than the 8086, but by then the 286 was out, and it's as powerful as the 68000, if not more so. |
That's quite a while after 1984. Again, I doubt Apple would have made much headway - most people needed DOS compatibility by then. The Mac OS was so tied in to the hardware for the first few years of the Mac's existence, that porting it wouldn't have been feasible.
quote:
The original MacOS wasn't that much better. MS-DOS was a glorified program launcher, the MacOS was a glorified program launcher with a GUI. |
It was infinitely better. I don't know if you were a computer user during the early 80s. Most schools used the Apple II, which was a pretty simple computer to use, but turned off a lot of people who found it intimidating.
At my high school we had a room full of Apple IIs which were almost universally used by guys - specifically guys who could be bothered to spend a while learning how to use it and who could remember how everything worked and which commands did what. Everyone else avoided them like the plague. All computers were like this: I had a couple of Sinclair machines and some friends had these or Commodore's stuff.
Then a Mac turned up. There were fights over who got to use it for the simple reason that anyone could learn how to use it in about 2 minutes and could get wonderful results with very little effort. From the point of view of the average person regular computers were mysterious entities that you had to learn a new language to use, the Mac required none of that. More to the point women liked using it (you can usually tell if it's easy to use if women like it - they won't put up with the crap that men do).
I remember typing an essay on an old DOS machine in the late 80s. What a joke. You had to remember all sorts of tasks assigned to the function keys and you couldn't see what you were getting. With the mac you did it all graphically and it was super easy.
Windows didn't get anywhere near this until Windows 3.1 (which I thought was OK - I had a 386 when I was an undergrad). But it still sucked. From memory it didn't even have a proper desktop and drag and drop didn't really work.
What's funny is that I remember PC vs Mac debates from the late 80s. PC users would complain that the GUI was a "toy" and that "real computer users" should learn the command line and put up with DOS. Of course when Windows finally became useable they changed their tune - but that gives you some idea of the stupidity of PC users in those days.
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22-01-2005 12:29
I couldn't remember using a command prompt was that hard. It only took about an hour to get used to the basic operations. Of course deep secrets such as memory management would take years.
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