paolucci@snll-arpagw.UUCP (Sam Paolucci) (03/05/88)
I think some of you may be interested in the following approximate test
that I ran using TeX to process an 8 1/2 page document on the machines
listed below. The following numbers need to be interpreted carefully
since the TeX version on the Amiga is from C source (and some 68000
assembly, right Tom Rokicki?) while the others are from Pascal sources.
Furthermore, the VAX-8700 and VAX-780 (running VMS) are multiuser
systems which were lightly loaded at the time. In all cases TeX, as
well as font files and document were all located either in a ram disk,
floppy disk, or hard disk as noted below. I did not have a hard disk on
the Amiga, so I couldn't check the time using it. The Amiga had 3 Megs
of ram, the Mac SE had 1 Meg, while the Mac II had 5 Megs. I believe
that the amount of ram does not play any role in the results. Well, the
envelope please (listed in order of system cost :-)):
CPU TIME (sec)
--- ----------
VAX-8700 8
VAX-780 30
Mac II (from hard disk) 31
Mac SE (from hard disk) 80
Amiga 2000 (from ram disk) 32
Amiga 2000 (from floppy disk) 54
I don't know about you, but I was pleasantly surprised by the above
numbers. I can only conclude that the Amiga is not a shabby machine :-)
and Tom Rokicki (who is often on the net) did a great job. By the way,
I have been using Amiga-TeX for a year and a half (and use it often to
write tech. papers at work) and have not found a single bug in it.
During that time I've found about 4 or 5 bugs between the previewer and
printer drivers, but they have all been squashed timely by Tom.