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highwaystar101 on 03 April 2010
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Sqrl said:
highwaystar101 said:

I'm aware of what HappySquirrel said, coding efficiency back then was greater for obvious reasons. I accept that as fact.

But the functions of computers throughout history have often been similar regardless of power. I still have my first laptop from 1995, and whilst my current laptop massively outperforms it, the basic functions are still pretty similar. My old laptop runs an old version of MS word as well as my new laptop runs Word 2007.

Does this make my old laptop from 1995 as powerful as my new laptop? Not by a long shot.

What is different is that technically my new laptop is a lot more powerful than my old one. Coding efficiency does not enter into the equation when deciding which one of my laptops is more powerful, despite similar performance when running the relative programs.

I'm afraid that no matter how efficient the SPC7600 was, it is still not as powerful as a modern laptop.

*I'm hungover as fuck*

Oh I'm not saying it actually is as powerful in terms of raw performance, but you can get some rather old equipment to match and even outperform newer equipment under some specific circumstances (and this possibly could be one of them). 

More to the point though I'm saying that these sorts of factors are probably what was being taken into account by whoever made the original claim of comparable power.  After all the people sent to do PR don't always present facts in the most exquisite technical detail =P

I know that you can get some old equipment to do some pretty amazing things when you put it under certain circumstances, I get a lot out of some of the old equipment I use at University. *Crosses fingers for new equipment this summer*.

I just think that it's a nice story, I've heard the claim two or three times, but I also think it has been highly romanticised. I think someone's augmented the truth to make it more appealing to the viewer, to make it sound rather more impressive than it actually is. I find documentaries (as well as articles and films, etc...) tend to do that with a wide variety of things.

(Another nice example of this kind of thing is Niels Bohr playing for the Danish national football team. Whilst he was a professional goalkeeper as well as a physicist, he most certainly never played for the Danish national football team. Yet this is claimed in almost every documentary about him because it makes the story of his life more appealing to the viewer.)