7 ms·
Windows-NT vs. CP/M
- gallerytungsten 16y agoA more realistic comparison would be Windows NT vs. Vax/VMS (which was of course its immediate parent). Conclusions would be similar, yo.
- j_baker 16y agoTrue. But Windows NT vs Linux is a much bigger stretch in that regard than Windows NT vs CP/M.
- oiuytuikolikuhy 16y ago>but it took a whole minute to boot up (Win-NT) Wow - my w2k server takes about a minute to even start loading windows. It spends half that time giving me copyright info about the 2 different sets of RAID controllers that I'm not using. It's easily 5 minutes before I can type something into Word - and that doesn't include connecting to the domain controller. Nearly 30 years my BBC micro with wordwise in Rom started in about the time it took the screen to turn on
- sudonim 16y ago"Window-NT system in the configuration that Microsoft likes to use for benchmarking will probably cost you about $100,000" Lol.
- emehrkay 16y agoWhat would a 100k system look like today, spec-wise? Is it even possible?
- die_sekte 16y agoA HP ProLiant DL980 G7 can cost more than twice that. 64 cores, 2 TB memory, ...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- psyklic 16y agoThe 100k mainly refers to the cost of hiring a team of engineers to tweak Windows NT for benchmarking!
- rbanffy 16y agoThat's totally unfair. A MCSE is much cheaper now than it was back in 2002!
- bpd1069 16y ago"Coming soon, we will compare a Windows-NT system vs. a brick. I'm not going to give away the ending, but I'm going to bet that the brick will win." - That made my day
- unp3rs0n 16y agoI agree with the OP that there is a lot of marketing bullcrap that gets around in the form of "whitepapers". But WNT has a sizeable server market share and is growing pretty well, so the OS itself is not trash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...).
- thwarted 16y agoThe size of the market does not indicate the quality of the product, only the size of the marketing budget.
- thwarted 16y agoSorry, I meant the amount of market share does not indicate the quality of the product.
- jawee 16y agoIt is still interesting to me how Android doesn't show up on web usage shares whereas iOS does; my website reports far more Android share than iOS (and I'm on Android now).
- j_baker 16y agoI'm curious to see the Microsoft papers this is a parody of.
- code_duck 16y agoIt refers to the comparisons that Microsoft was always releasing back in what I call 'the Slashdot days', 1998-2002 or so. One of the better known was a report made by a company called Mindcraft in 1999. If I recall correctly, they were hired by Microsoft to produce these benchmarks, though they didn't make that clear. Or worse, actually. The report is here: http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/first-nts4rhlinux.html http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/first-nts4rhlinux.html A LinuxToday article discussing the paper, in which Linus points out that the benchmark seems to have been literally performed at Microsoft: http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-04-27-002-10-NW-LF http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-04-27-00... A LWN article: http://lwn.net/1999/features/MindCraft1.0.php3 http://lwn.net/1999/features/MindCraft1.0.php3 "Executive Summary Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 is 2.5 times faster than Linux as a File Server and 3.7 times faster as a Web Server"
- Luyt 16y agoI can remember switching from Win 3.1 to Win NT. It was slower to boot up, but in the end saved me much time. I was developing C software at the time, and pointer bugs would usually crash Win 3.1 and leave the system in an unusable state, requiring a full reboot. However, under Win NT processes were much better separated from the OS and rebooting was suddenly a thing of the past.
- wazoox 16y agoI remember in 1998 spending an afternoon debugging a C++ program that kept crashing for no reason. In fact at some point the windows NT 3D screen saver had crashed, and brought down the complete 3D stack with it. The program worked perfectly after a reboot...
- code_duck 16y agoSurely NT4 is better than Win 3.1 or Win 98, both of which are deplorably unstable. However, NT4 isnot that much better, on my experience. Win 2000 was where windows started being decent.
- Luyt 16y agoWin NT 3.51 was the first version I used. It looked like the old Win 3.1 at the time, and using PROGMAN.EXE instead of the windows Explorer (NT4 was the one getting the Win95 look, IIRC). In version 3.51, the video subsystem ran in usermode, and not in kernel mode. That happened in NT4 I think.
- norswap 16y agoI have an old Macintosh in my basement, and it boots faster than most computers I use nowadays. It does not prove anything excepted that every operating system existing added bloat over the past decades. On another note, I still can't find a Linux distribution that will run my netbook faster than Windows XP. (Heck, I even tried ArchLinux, installing only what I needed with a tiling window manager.) The problem seems to be the graphics (i.e. the X server) is just painfully slow. I now understands why Ubuntu wants to invest in Wayland. But imho there are other parts of the kernel which are just as crappy. It always makes me laugh when I see a Linux distro branded "for old computers", Windows XP being always faster on those computers (and the distros relatively slow) because the distros use recent kernels.
- TwoSheds 16y agoXP has the "windows rot" problem. After it has been in use for a couple of months, it slows down significantly and especially booting it takes forever. Some people claim that they can avoid this but I have never seen any hard evidence :)
- Maro 16y agoThere's a free tool called Sysinternals Autoruns (autoruns.exe) which lets you remove all kinds of startup/resident crap. I use it to clean up every couple of months, and as a result my XP is as fast as after a fresh install.
- rbanffy 16y agoThere is pagedefrag, also from the sysinternals folks. That said, Linux doesn't have a similar Linux rot problem. I have some installs that have been going since 2002 or so, with successive "apt-get dist-upgrade"s crossing releases without much significant trouble except a ssh key regen.
- norswap 16y agoI manage to do pretty well. A good uninstaller (which performs deep scans), a defragmenter (MyDefrag is best) and CCleaner will do the trick. But it's true that a little reinstall once every few years can't give a slight speedup. Nowadays I tend toward a nomad setup (using portable apps) anyway, so it's even easier.
- jcfrei 16y agohilarious
- hackermom 16y agoThe ironic part is that no matter how humorous the article is, it's accurate.
- sjs 16y agoIt may be accurate but you still have to question whether the comparisons were useful. We all know that you don't boot the machine to type a document, power it down, and then boot it again to work on your finance spreadsheet. Including boot times in benchmarks that are otherwise only based on typing speed is just silly.
- rbanffy 16y agoThere is an important difference between a Kaypro II (as this one was reviewed) and a post-XT PC: all the state of the machine is in the floppies. And you can boot the PC, insert the Wordstar floppy, work on it, remove it, insert the spreadsheet floppy (or keep both programs on the same disk) and compute away.
- nerd_in_rage 16y agoLook at a high-end Amiga from ~20 years ago (such as an Amiga 3000). You have roughly 75% of what we have today on a much lower end hardware platform. Sad, isn't it?
- jeberle 16y agoIt had better boot fast. CP/M makes you reboot every time you swap a disk. Note, you could make the same case for an IBM PC with two 5.25" drives (DOS).