I have a dual 2.5ghz G5 tower. I noticed that old PowerPC versions of MS Office are faster on the G5 than the latest version of Office on an i7.
It was really interesting to load and launch a few old apps that I worked with daily during the 603e / 604e / G3 time period. They absolutely fly. The G5 was very fast for its day. It was just way too hot and power hungry, and IBM never managed to shrink it and tame it for notebooks.
Interesting that G5s are still in use in the music industry. I commented to one friend in publishing that if it wasn’t for clients sending newer InDesign and Illustrator files, he could outfit his office with G5 towers and install older software from Macintosh Garden and his designers probably wouldn’t miss a beat.
Software optimized for the PPC’s vector pipelines could crunch data way better than everything that was contemporary.
Worked for a small company that did a lot of video handling & we wrote software to custom encode a lot of video streams and we tested every box with different CPU’s we could obtain. Settled on racks of PPC XServes as their vector units just blew AMD, Intel Sun SPARC and everything else out of the water. (The switch to intel happened way after I left there)
You have no idea how disappointed our local Sun rep was when we had him watch the benchmark tests - our code vs sun engineers code running on their hardware. He really wanted that sale but … oh well
I screwed up my XP hard drive and had to do a do over. I had a old version of Fox-It PDF reader, installed it and did not update. It starts up almost instantly with a simple PDF. Nowadays it’s a lot longer to open things and the interface looks modern but isn’t as quick and useful. I still use an audio editor Cool Edit 96 (predecessor of Adobe Audition) just because it is not complicated and starts up quick and does basic functions easy and fast.
Even the Adobe paradigm. For some reason my 2013 InDesign stopped opening. Tried everything, nothing. Called Adobe, they didn’t support old versions, told me to post on their forum, the engineers would respond there. Never did. Only option is to update, which requires the Creative Cloud and paying $10 a month forever - to fix a bug!!! I know a Adobe engineer, he said he’d help me, but he’s a professional keyboard player (a good one0 and he has to get home from his world tour. Truth.
Old software and old hardware is very beneficial, it’s not just for nostalgia. But keep the worlds separate, aside from file networking.
