The last time Mac OS 6 was commonly in use, most of today's high-school students hadn't even been born.

The System 6 machines - the Mac Classic, Mac Plus and the Mac IIci - were ludicrously underpowered by today's blistering standards. For an age in which RAM, HD space and processor speed are measured in the "giga" range, using a Mac Classic with 4 MB of RAM running at 8 (that's eight) MHz would seem tantamount to driving a Ford Model T (last built in 1927).

Despite this difference, some hard-core Mac fans insist that System 6 is actually  better for some computing tasks - particularly word processing. Is it possible that a vintage 1990 Apple running OS 6 can open a Microsoft Word document faster than a new PC running Windows 2000? You may be surprised.

According to "Moore's Law," computer performance grows exponentially, doubling about every two years. It therefore makes sense that the latest computer would perform  tasks at least 500 times faster than something built sixteen years ago. All other factors being equal, this is true...

But.

Anyone who has used computers for any length of time has no doubt noticed that file size has expanded as much as horsepower has increased. When I started using the popular 3D figure modeler Poser back in '95, a file was typically between 200 and 500 KB. Today, a single Poser model (such as "David" or "Stephanie") can run over a 100 megabytes. Same with the applications - the correlation to Moore's Law is that software expands to consume all resources available to it. If you've used MS Word for any length of time, you know what's being talked about, here.

For kicks and giggles, some hard-core vintage Mac geeks ran some tests, putting various System 6 Macs up against an "average" modern PC. The Mac models - a Classic and a IIci - were tested both in their "stock" forms and with some processor upgrades (none running faster than 40 MHz). The Windows machine was an IBM Think Center with a 3 GHz Pentium 4HT processor, 512 MB RAM, running MS Word 2002 with Windows 2000 Pro.

The results are shown on the charts below (click thumbnails to see full-sized images). Who'd have thought?