
Windows-NT vs. CP/M - davesailer
http://www.oualline.com/practical.programmer/cpm.html
======
norswap
I 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.

~~~
wazoox
Usually the slowness comes from the graphic driver, not the X server. Many
netbooks use an intel graphic chipset with closed specs, and therefore run
under linux using the very slow VESA driver. This is definitely the makers
(particularly Intel) fault, not Linux.

~~~
dmm
Actually Intel is one of the best manufacturers about releasing documentation.
Nvidia is one of the worst. ATI/AMD is pretty good.

Suspend/resume is problematic because the device manufacturers don't implement
ACPI to the spec, the implement it to whatever works with Windows. Try OpenBSD
sometime. Their have an independent implementation of AML that might work
where others do not.

~~~
vetinari
While Intel is pretty good with the support in general, they screwed up with
the Poulsbo (GMA500) thing, which was popular in netbooks.

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oiuytuikolikuhy
>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

------
bpd1069
"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

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unp3rs0n
I 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_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems)).

~~~
thwarted
The size of the market does not indicate the quality of the product, only the
size of the marketing budget.

~~~
thwarted
Sorry, I meant the _amount of market share_ does not indicate the quality of
the product.

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gallerytungsten
A more realistic comparison would be Windows NT vs. Vax/VMS (which was of
course its immediate parent).

Conclusions would be similar, yo.

~~~
j_baker
True. But Windows NT vs Linux is a much bigger stretch in that regard than
Windows NT vs CP/M.

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nerd_in_rage
Look 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?

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j_baker
I'm curious to see the Microsoft papers this is a parody of.

~~~
code_duck
It 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>

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=1999-04-27-00...](http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-04-27-002-10-NW-
LF)

A LWN article: <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"

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sudonim
"Window-NT system in the configuration that Microsoft likes to use for
benchmarking will probably cost you about $100,000"

Lol.

~~~
emehrkay
What would a 100k system look like today, spec-wise? Is it even possible?

~~~
psyklic
The 100k mainly refers to the cost of hiring a team of engineers to tweak
Windows NT for benchmarking!

~~~
rbanffy
That's totally unfair. A MCSE is much cheaper now than it was back in 2002!

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Luyt
I 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.

~~~
code_duck
Surely 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
Win 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.

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jcfrei
hilarious

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hackermom
The ironic part is that no matter how humorous the article is, it's accurate.

~~~
sjs
It 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
There 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.

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jeberle
It 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).

