Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!caen.engin.umich.edu!billkatt
From: billkatt@caen.engin.umich.edu (Steve Bollinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac Plus ??
Message-ID: <401a38a0.129dc@blue.engin.umich.edu>
Date: 7 Dec 88 00:38:00 GMT
References: <508NETOPRRW@NCSUVM> <771@husc6.harvard.edu> <401920b8.1285f@maize.engin.umich.edu> <1282@mace.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: billkatt@caen.engin.umich.edu (Steve Bollinger)
Organization: caen
Lines: 76

In article <1282@mace.cc.purdue.edu> ajq@mace.cc.purdue.edu (John O'Malley) writes:
>In article <401920b8.1285f@maize.engin.umich.edu> billkatt@caen.engin.umich.edu (Steve Bollinger) writes:
>>Suffice to say, the Platinum Plus will work
>>with any hard drive that the SE will.  But the SE will do so more than
>>50% faster.

>Huh?  I've got a Mac Plus (platinum, born February 1988) with an external
>Everex EMAC-20DL hard disk.  My roommate has a Mac SE with Apple's internal
>hard disk.
Apple's internal drive is notoriously slow, 85ms.

>We tested the machines for speed differences.  We put the same several-page
>long Microsoft Word document on each disk and then opened it at the same
>time.  The SE beat the Plus only by 3 seconds.  That's probably average
>for most routine operations.
You didn't test the machines for SCSI speed differences.  Included in your
'open' is a lot of processing by Word to show the file in a coherent format.
So a lot of the speed-up is masked.  But, that does seem reasonable for a
file open difference.

>
>I maintain a lab on campus with twenty hard-disk equipped Mac SEs.  They
>don't seem to work noticably faster than my Mac Plus.
You haven't looked hard enough.  Run 'The Colony' on a Plus and an SE (not
even necessarily side-by-side), you will notice quite a speed difference (this
is in the processor speed).  As for disk speed, there really is no test for
transfer rate except for SCSI evaluator, the next best might be DiskExpress,
the 'verify media' option.

first, I'd like to start with an errata, I meant to say 'up to 50% faster',
sorry about that.  Second, I said that the disk access would be about 50%
faster, not MS-Word.  Some people think that speeding up their HD will speed
up their throughput the same amount, a common misconception.  On the other
hand, many people look at the SE and say the because the processor is only
16% faster, the machine is only 16% faster, but the 50% speed up in the SCSI
makes a difference too.

I can back my speed claims.  But first, I was unaware the Mac Plus supported
blind reads (in a very poor way).  The SE has a 2:1 interleave, the Plus, a
3:1, there is a 50% speedup already (2 turns per track as opposed to 3 turns
per track).  Also, the SE has hardware for SCSI blind reads (and writes), and
I quote from IM V- 'The blind mode does not poll the DRQ line and is
therefore about 50% faster', so properly written drivers can write 50% faster
on the SE than the Plus.  No, you can not add the 50% from interleave and the
50% from transfer rate and say the SE is 100% faster, but 50% is not wildly
ridiculous.

>
>Rumors once called for the phase-out of the Plus.  But didn't Apple just
>retool its factory to build Plus's cheaper?  Doesn't sound like something
>a company would do right before discontinuing a product.

Apple has said that they would be producing the Plus until December '89, and
I believe them.  But that does not that you would want to buy one.  Apple
will soon probably come out with a machine equivalent to the SE that is about
the price of the Plus.  Why?  Because costs no more to produce.  Apple could
save money by switching totally over to the ADB (the ADB mouse costs less to
produce than the Plus mouse), and the SCSI and processor speedups/changes
don't cost more to produce, they just cost money to develop.  Also, the Plus
uses an older clock chip than the SE, Apple could save money by changing to
the new one (they did it with the 512KE, some late ones had the Plus clock
chip because Apple could get a better price on it).  In short, the only
reasons Apple hasn't done all this is that they could no longer justify the
price differential between the Plus and the SE to its customers.  But the SE
is soon to change, and won't be comparable to the Plus anymore.

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| Steve Bollinger      | Internet: billkatt@caen.engin.umich.edu            |
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