The basics

“After all, most users don’t know or care whether their computer has a 65nm dual-core CPU or a tiny midget wizard squatting in their cases. All they care about is how it works and how quickly it does the tasks we most often ask it to do.”
From Apple Mac Plus vs AMD Dual Core by Hal Licino. It is the beginning of what UK journalists call the ‘silly season’ where there isn’t much news so you have to make some up. Hal and his friends decided to compare a current production Dual Core Intel based computer running Windows XP and Vista with a 1980s Apple Mac Plus, and they based their comparison on everyday tasks that real people perform.



I remember using an Acorn A3000 to surf the Web and do e-mail in the early to mid-90s. A 12MHz 32 bit ARM chip ran the whole machine including what would now be called ‘integrated graphics’. What amazed me then (and still does) was the !Draw module that was part of the RISC-OS operating system. Draw handled all printing and image rendering from files and provided a common standard so that Web pages could be saved as Draw files – vector files mark you – and then printed, or imported into the !Draw application and edited. It all worked a bit like PDF on Mac OS X does.

Enough of the ‘good old days’ and I’ll be posting GCSE Revision links over on gcsemaths.org.uk over the weekend – its too late for the non-calculator paper now so I’ll be working on the usual calculator paper topics. Back to Maths here on bodmas as well.



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