At 3:11 PM -0800 2/2/00, Dave Huang wrote:
>On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, dkphoto wrote:
>> Am I to conclude from this that the 'rumors' about Unix/Linux/BSD being
>> fast on older Macs and PC's are less than accurate? I had dreams of
>> breathing life back into several of these old machines. Is it just a
>> bunch of nonsense?
>
>Well, I'd say it's fast compared to MacOS or Windows 9x/NT on the same
>hardware. However, it's slow compared to the latest hardware :) Whether
>it's fast enough depends on what you want to do... I'd disagree that an
>old Mac would be too slow for doing school assignments though; when I
>was in school, intro to programming type assignments were done on Mac
>Pluses and Mac SEs (Lightspeed Pascal, I think), and the speed seemed

Lightspeed Pascal was a *really* fast, slick compiler/IDE.  Much more
integrated and more CPU efficient than gcc ever was or will be.

>fine... I don't think the CPU power needed by such programs has
>really increased over the years :) The assignments for the partial
>differential equations class were done on some vector processing VAX
>running VMS though :)

When I said an '030 machine wasn't fast enough I was referring to the speed
of the compiler on that hardware.  I'm sure it's fast enough to run the
assignments.  It's just the speed of the compile/test/fix cycle that I'm
worried about.  As for the CPU power not increasing for assignments, let's
not forget that gcc keeps getting bigger and not necessarily faster.

I once tried to take some C++ work home with me to check out on my IIcx.
After seeing that one single file took longer to compile on the IIcx than
the entire project did on an early model Sun 4 I gave up doing compiles on
the machine.

That said I think my IIcx should be fine for a small home router if I can
figure out what's wrong with the hardware.

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