The alarm clock goes off, buzzing insistently until I reach out a hand and groggily slap at the button to silence the sound. I roll out of bed, pause for a few minutes, then head for the shower.

After breakfast, I head down to the office. I’ve got several different projects in flight. The new Macintosh has arrived, sporting a new operating system revision. Apple’s finally broken the silly fixed memory limit for applications, but the new OS still can’t multitask worth a damn. Apple’s number one market share—about fifteen percent of the PC market—make it a little complacent. Of course, it helps that Apple is unified, and that the other 85% are running a variety of different operating systems.

I fire up the Macintosh I use as my office system and log onto the Internet using the latest AppleWeb, which is at least graphical, based on the Mosaic code. It beat out the line-mode graphics browsers on most of the CP/M machines littering my office. I could afford the resources for a graphical browser because I had an ISDN link running into the office. I’d talked to various phone companies about bringing in faster service, but they kept telling me there just were too many varieties of PCs with a confusing array of networking capabilities to really make high-speed access affordable for most homes.

Which brings me to one of my other projects—benchmark development. The multiple flavors of CP/M 2005 and Unix versions, make performance testing a headache. The good news these days is that developers are all writing relatively portable code, so most systems run the same—or at least similar—applications.

I sometimes wonder why anyone would be interested in owning a PC. It’s not so much the hardware, which has steadily gotten cheaper. You can buy a decent 32-bit system based on an Intel, Motorola, or Zilog processor for only a couple thousand dollars these days. But the software costs are stunning. WordStar 2005 still runs several hundred dollars, though WordPerfect’s pricing strategies since Borland bought the company has helped keep it more affordable. Lotus still has a lock on the spreadsheet market, and $695 is too much for most users.

The bottom line is that developing meaningful benchmarks for different operating systems is pretty painful. Then there’s Apple and Commodore, who keep pressing us for graphics benchmarks, while IBM suggests that “real” graphical interfaces are still years away.

Of course, Commodore hasn’t been the same since it was bought by Hewlett-Packard, but at least HP had the good sense to keep it fairly independent of the rest of HP. It was a classic HP move, though, to buy a PC company that had a dedicated following, but wasn’t really mainstream. Still, HP’s engineering has improved the Amiga’s reliability over the years. Continued…