When I bought my first computer, a an IBM XT clone with a hercules monitor and 20 meg hard drive,

man that was a great computer.  The first thing I wanted to do with it besides play games, was to program it, then, I quickly found out that I couldn’t. It didn’t have a Text Editor, nor BASIC, nor a language I know how to program for that fact.  However, it did have edlin, it is usable, but it is like getting kick in the groin with a pair of high heeled shoes, some people like it, and I wasn’t interested in finding out what that was like,  using edlin was pain enough for me.  I did learn eventually there was another way to enter code into a file, that was by using the copy con command. Where you could pretend you had a full screen editor.  It actually wasn’t a bad option, if I wanted to enter something in quick, it would do.  However, by that time I paid for another text editor, Qedit, and was programming in Turbo Pascal, so it’s IDE was available when I wrote Pascal programs, by this time I was starting to actually buy software, so this was a legit copy.

Eventually I started to buy more software, and ended up getting Dos 5 upgrade.   Even though DOS 3.1 was a decent little system, I found that DOS 5 was better,  one it had manuals; and learned what actually came with it, such as it’s own built in text editor and it had it’s own version of Basic.  Unfortunately I played that Gorilla banana throwing game for way too many hours.

Personally I preferred Qedit.  It had a few features that made coding a little easier, such as using macros, this was a handy feature that I learned about those when I was working on Vax Systems using the EVE editor.  Macros are great, you didn’t have to do alot of the same command over and over.  Eventually as time rolled on, I was exposed to other text editors,  like brief.

However, for that brief period moment of time, all time seemed to stop, you didn’t have to worry about keeping up with some new program or computer, if you wanted a new program, you usually wrote what you needed.  Dos at the time was simple and straightforward, it wasn’t perfect, nothing is.  What I did learn and enjoyed from that time; except how to take a whole evening to learn how C pointers work; is that what ever you have, if you are willing to work at it, you can always make it work the way you want.   You have to be creative and the only thing that stops you, is your imagination.  It is a good thing to remember.

Ok, So I have this computer, which if you think about it is nothing more then a glorified word processor.  Be cause that is all we do with them is either surf the web, write blogs/emails, play games, or just watch/listen to some kind of media on them.  Now if you think about it is kind of sad.  The computers of today; laptops or Desktops can do so much more then that.  If all you really wanted to do that, in reality all you would really need is an old IBM PC,  IBM pc article,.  Add a Hercules video monochrome board, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card you could actually have a pretty decent display, 16 different shades of grey.

Ok, you probably couldn’t get that great of sound out of it so get a Commodore computer, it would do all that you need to do.  And it also had 16 bit color.
http://www.c64.com/

That in its self is kind of sad too.  Considering that a Cray 2 computer from the 1985 did 3.9  was clocked doing 3.9 GigaFlops, (billion floating point instructions per seco

So, I got to thinking, what can a MacBook really do, what kind of power do I have available to me?  So I started to look, first of all I was curious what kind of actual flops can it perform? unfortunately,  I got articles about will the mac flop, flop weekly etc.  then I added gigaflops, then I got a bunch of links to Macbook Pro…. Hmmm, this is not what I was looking.  So, I’m doing searches on the duo core processor, which of course I don’t what model it is. Ok after looking at the Apple website for macbook 13, it has a 2.26 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, dang, that is actually pretty impressive.
Looking at the intel site, http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/cs-023143.htm
I found the following information about my processor,

The number I was really interested in was associated with Gflops, (gigaflops)  Billions of floating point instructions per second.  The sixth column, it can do well over 5 times the processing power of a super computer of the 80’s.  Those are the computers Nasa would use to put men into space or map out the Mars’ Terrain.

 Ok, now I’m really curious, so what can it really do in bench marks :D.  My first search, pay dirt, I found a product Xbench, http://www.xbench.com.  After a quick download and install.  Found out that my processor can do about 3.05 Gflops, ok not 36.16, however I do have several apps open at the same time.  That might account for the system drag…  Ok not that much, however, looking at what it can do is still pretty good.  So this means to me, I probably could get an app to map the terrain on mars and feel pretty confident that my lap top is up to the task.

Thanks
John