Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 UW 5/3/83; site uw-beaver Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxj!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!info-mac From: info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) Newsgroups: fa.info-mac Subject: Why is the Mac so slow? Message-ID: <2323@uw-beaver> Date: Mon, 26-Nov-84 02:52:36 EST Article-I.D.: uw-beave.2323 Posted: Mon Nov 26 02:52:36 1984 Date-Received: Wed, 28-Nov-84 03:33:15 EST Sender: yenbut@uw-beave Organization: U of Washington Computer Science Lines: 21 From: Mike Caplinger I really like my Macintosh, but as I use it I find myself wondering more and more why the Mac is so SLOW. I recently used an IBM PC with Turbo Pascal (I was forced) and was very impressed with its blinding compilation speed. Contrast that with MacPascal, where trying to run the program whirrs the disk for a few seconds, thinks about it some more, and then starts execution. This is just an example; all applications have some operation which takes a long time. And switching between applications is PAINFULLY slow. I don't really understand this. With a large chunk of the system in ROM and 128K of memory, I would think that programs would talk to the disk much less frequently than they seem to. I understand about resource files, purgable segments, etc, but the end result is really very slow compared to an MS-DOS or even a CP/M system. I surely don't want to go back to CP/M (and the tty user interface that implies), but is there really a reason for Macintosh programs to be such dogs starting up, closing down, and doing non-trivial computation? Is this situation ever going to change? Or do programmers just get correspondingly lazy when given a faster machine with more memory?