To:  All                        Message #:  3206
    From:  Larry Schneider            Submitted:  08 Mar 91
Subject:  speed compairsons             Status:  Public
Received:  No                             Group:  APPLE (14)

In a recent message to all, Robert Hardman wrote:

"In a variety of word processors, they replaced 1300
occurrences of "Mac"with "Macintosh".  Their
-- presumably averaged -- speed results ranged from
a low of 219 seconds on the Mac Classic (8 Mhz 68000)
to seconds on the Mac IIfx (40 Mhz 68030)."

And a little further along in his message he writes:

"As I see it, there are three possible explanations:
1) They didn't report their test and/or results correctly.
If this was the case, the benchmark was
irreproducible even for a Mac owner.
2) the over-engineered software of the Mac
slows things down a hell of a lot.
I think this is very likely, considering the
differences between AW and FW.
3) The 68--- series is hideously overrated.
I think this is also likely.  Ask Bill Mensch!"

I decided to do a little testing of my own.  As you should
expect, I used Apple Writer.  I did three tests:  The symbol
"^M" indicates a carriage return

A)  MacMacMacMacMac......(1300 of the worthless buggers
                          with NO carriage return)

B)  Mac Mac Mac Mac .....(1300 of the worthless buggers
                          with 10 to a line)
C)  Mac^M
    Mac^M
    Mac^M                (1300 of the worthless buggers)
    .
    .
    .

D)  Mac      ^M
    Mac      ^M
    Mac      ^M          (1300 of the worthless buggers)
    .
    .
    .

The results were of ten 'tests' averaged.  All times are in
seconds. For the larger numbers, I did not bother to include
decimals as I felt them to be meaningless.  For the smaller
numbers - my watch goes to 1/100 ths of a second; however,
I'm a fat old man whose reflexes are not that great; I'll
just give the results as I've indicated.

TEST                A         B         C         D

IIgs               129       7.3       4.4       5.3
8 meg ZIP IIe       46       2.6       1.9       2.1

First thing to note is: much depends on how the word "Mac"
is placed in the text file.  I'll not bother with showing a
display of what the replacement of Mac by Macintosh  in test
"A" looked like, but will tell you that Apple Writer needed
to do a lot of formating in test "A".  From this experience,
I would like to know how "Mac" was formated in the original
tests done by MacWorld! Next, I'll agree with #2 of Robert's
conclusions.  Just imagine what a Mac IIfx could be without
that worthless GUI!!!!!!  Just imagine what the IIgs would
be without emulating that same worthless GUI.  I'll disagree
with #3 however; 68xxx does graphics very nicely.  I would
bet that Apple Writer could be ported over to a 68xxx very
easily.  I believe my own testing puts #1 into further
question; i.e. MacWorld or Robert need to be more careful
as to how results are reported.