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What have you done with a PowerPC today?
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@jouster
I usually prefer format SATA\SAS drives with SAS controller (LSI1068\LSI2008 wit IT firmware have this option), as first. If SAS isn't available - use dd in Linux for entire drive (time consuming, but it can also show some problems, if any, with drive itself - stops at some value in progress).
I use
iBored
apps.tempel.org
As to the what have I done with PPC today (for a second week in a row) - testing all possible mSATA, M.2 and "naked" SATA drives with all sorts of SATA-PATA adapters in Mac Mini and various PB G4's.
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I received a Titanium G4 in... overall reasonable condition... and a gig of OWC RAM that I should probably put in!
Is it the RAM or the CPU? Seems like the cpu usage on these taps out quickly, at least by modern standards, but most of the programs have been very light on RAM so far that I've been playing with
I think it was the RAM... activity monitor just after boot already looked gloomy.
I put the gig of RAM in there, seems better so far? Also... this thing must have the easiest-to-upgrade RAM of any laptop I've ever seen, Windows or Mac...
Try opening a browser with current security updates (i.e., Interweb-PPC) and watch just how much RAM gets consumed by even the use of one tab.
This is an effective way to watch my iBook G3/466 with max 576MB RAM grind to a molasses slog. And yet, somehow, it can run Civilization III without a problem.
People used to know how to write efficient software. My guess is Civilization III probably needs less RAM/CPU than a 'hello world' program written in Electron...
Were optimization of coding still be an imperative, I’d be amazed to know what current machines could accomplish — to say nothing of my humble G3. I mean, the dual-redundant G3s used on NASA/JPL missions, including the most recent Perseverance rover, run the entire mission on a G3 clocked about half as fast as my G3/466, and the amount and quality of science data it crunches is just… staggering.
Indeed. Civ III only needs 64MB to run, expansions pushed that up to 256MB. The game will use more RAM if you have it, but 512MB is plenty.
Stuff has become laughably bloated. I do mostly the same stuff in Excel that I did 28 years ago, back when it used 8MB of RAM. Today the same task requires at least 4GB and 16GB is highly recommended for massive Excels, the kind I used to crunch with 32-64MB without issue. The availability of large memory has made people simply stop caring if an app takes a few gig when it could easily run with much less.
Yup, and EVERYTHING has embedded web browser engines. 300-400 megs of RAM on a good day for each one of those...
That being said, RAM is cheap. I remember paying $250CAD for 4 megs of RAM for a Windows box in 1995. I don't remember, but I suspect, adjusted for inflation, that's about what I spent to put 128 gigs of RAM in my iMac in 2022.
RAM is cheap, but RAM slots and RAM channels are precious and few.
I don't disagree... first thing I installed on this TiBook was OS 9. Not sure why the seller didn't have OS 9 on it, just 10.3.8...If you must run OSX, get yourself a 15" Al PowerBook G4 that can take 2 GB of RAM. TiBooks are OS9 species, don't torture them!
I've quickly learned the modern internet is painful on the G4s in the brief time I've had them. All the optimisation I can find, but the amount of data thrown at the machine is still overwhelming. Fine for Wikipedia or no-noise browsing with Frogfind though (but that's pretty tolerable even on my '89 Mac SE).
But running applications built for the machine in its own era? Most run very well and use very little RAM so far that I've encountered. I don't think it's fair to hold the modern web against it
But running applications built for the machine in its own era? Most run very well and use very little RAM so far that I've encountered. I don't think it's fair to hold the modern web against it
On the contrary: the hypertext transfer protocol was never engineered or intended to be a vehicle or conveyance for full-bore “web applications” whose frameworks and APIs concern themselves principally over the most recent hardware and browser pairing available (i.e., “progressive enhancement”) — code optimizations and degrading gracefully be damned.
I think it's the other way around - I hold it against the modern web. Just feels like most of the performance improvements since the G4 era have gone to feeding the modern web...
Also, look at storage speeds - the old software runs/patches/etc rather quickly on old-fashioned hard drives. Now stuff is so bloated you need SSDs for similar performance.
One thing I will say that's interesting about the PPC platform is that, unlike, say, Windows machines of the same era, the PPC platform died somewhat of a premature death. Which means there doesn't really seem to be that much software that runs slowly on it - that software just was never able to run on it in the first place. Other than, I guess, people's attempts at making a modern web browser for it...
I wouldn't say that. There were some processor intensive native audio applications and native real-time plug-ins in OS9 that brought any G4 machine of that era almost to a halt. Waves C4 multiband compressor was one such example, MH SpectraFoo application - the other. I used both and know the pain.
There is some quality (double-precision, floating point, oversampling) audio stuff for PPC/OSX that runs slow too.
I think you misunderstood - I agree, I'm blaming the modern web. I meant I don't hold struggles with the modern web against the G4. It's not its fault that it is getting bombarded far beyond something it was designed for and thus performs poorly. It's amazing how inefficient the modern web is
Okay, fair enough. I was thinking more of general-purpose applications, e.g. Office 2008.
Up until early this year, one of my daily driver systems was a Performa 630CD. Running anything era-appropriate, meaning up to the early web, it was on a par with an i7 Windows 10 box, comparing 'like' for 'like', meaning Word 6 vs Word 365. Running the two systems side by side every day, it was interesting to discover how little of the modern features and resources in the Win 10 box were actually ever needed.
The only time I use a modern system now is for web-related tasks. I can't say I otherwise miss the 'power'.
I kind of want to try daily driving the iBook G4 I just got, but the web is what is holding me back. I can't really see any issue with using it otherwise. Sadly, so much of my job and modern life are in fact internet dependent that a painful web experience is very disruptive indeed 😞
Okay, that's a bit radical for me...
I was a Windows guy from the 1995 to the early 2010s, so I don't have my version numbers quite right on the Mac side, but there were a number of nice features added to Word after 6, e.g. on-the-fly spell checking, on-the-fly grammar checking, etc. All things that would fall in the 'we had the idea before but the hardware couldn't do it until the late 1990s' category.
But what seems to have happened to MS Word is that around, oh, I don't know, version 2003 or so on the Windows side, they seem to have run out of obvious ideas in that category and most of the added features, other than the (nice) UI revamp with 2007, were more of the collaboration/Internet/etc variety than anything else. It's actually only in the last few years that they've started innovating a bit again, e.g. with that new grammar checker that finally replaces a grammar checker that I think had been unchanged for 20 years.
I think I'd be mostly fine with Word 2000 on the Windows side or... what's-that-version-I-have-on-OS-9-on-my-MDD on the Mac side, but going back to Word 6? Wow.
The 630 does pretty badly on the modern web, though gopher and FTP are generally ok. Back in MacOS 8 days, that was about all there was anyway. But my 12-inch G4 PowerBook running 10.4 (Tiger) is much better for browsing. Slow, but surprisingly workable.
My day job was an IT manager, and colleagues were astonished to find old systems running alongside modern equipment... and actually doing useful work at reasonable speeds. I even had one of them borrowing my PowerBook 170 or 180 for 'distraction free' drafting of documents.
It would have been Word 98 and later that brought on the fly spell and grammar checking, but for what I do, that's a major distraction and not at all helpful. In fact, there are times when it helps me to go all the way back to the text editor in a Tandy 102 or 200 where there are no real features at all.
For me, the problem with Word as it morphed and evolved over the years was in finding how to reliably turn OFF the features I didn't want, where it typically messed with formatting or distracted with idiotic features. I don't need nonsense interfering with document production, but by the time we got to versions post Word 6 (which wasn't pleasant, but at least worked) Word was not a productivity tool for my use at all. 5.1 was the last neat and efficient version.
I have recently rediscovered MacWrite Pro 1.5, which is actually a good alternative, and means I can dump Word 6!