PC vs Commodore: Side by Side

by Dick Estel

A great deal of space in Commodore club newsletters over the years has been devoted to explaining
why people use this "outdated" machine or why it is better than a PC for most people. Most of these
reports are subjective. I thought it might be useful to present some side-by-side comparisons that offer
the opportunity for a somewhat more objective view.

Graphic display: It would be hard for anyone to claim that the visual display on a modern PC,
whether text or graphics, is anything but miles above what the Commodore can do. This alone is reason
enough for many people to make the switch.

Word processing: I can only compare the programs I am most familiar with, The Write Stuff  (TWS)
for the C128, and Word Perfect (WP) for the PC. For desktop publishing, WP takes the lead. You
can create a large newsletter or similar document, in one single Word Perfect file, which contains all the
text, headlines, graphics, etc. TWS does let you use large type, but control over the placement is
limited. Including graphics with the Illustrator version seemed to me to be a form of torture when I tried
it. You can't put a line around a paragraph or shading behind it. 

However, don't fault TWS--for pure word processing it has some features that beat WP. When it
comes to sorting lists, TWS is easier to use than WP. Consider this list:

Jones, William
Jones, Al
Jones, Kevin
Jackson, Dale

TWS will sort this list in exact order, Dale, Al, Kevin, and William. WP looks only at the first word, so
while Dale will move to the top, all the Joneses will be left in the order you type them. You have to
define additional sort fields in order to sort the way TWS does by default.

Searching and replacing is another area where TWS takes an edge. For normal text search, WP works
fine and is quite a bit faster. But there are times when I want to search for non-text characters. For
example, at the end of each paragraph, TWS puts a return character in the form of a back arrow.
Again, look at my name list. Suppose I want to list these people and their job title, and I list all the
System Programmers first. Instead of typing System Programmer over and over, with TWS I can tab
and hit [RETURN], then go back, search for the [RETURN]'s and replace them with the words
"System Programmer." WP will do this, but you have to enter the code for the character from a
complicated and not always clear list.

Let's give WP a few points--I don't know what the file-size limit is, since I've never encountered it. I
have a number of TWS files that I've had to divide into as many as four parts, even with TWS128...a
big plus for WP. Up through WP 6.xx spell checking was not much faster than TWS operating with the
dictionary files in a RAM expander. WP 7.0 takes a big step forward with on-the-fly spell
checking...any questionable word is underlined in red.

Astronomy Program: I'm sure there is an astronomy program for the PC somewhere that would
knock anyone's socks off. I haven't found it yet, and it probably costs over $100. I've used Sky Travel
for Commodore for a number of years, but I was sure anything I bought for my PC would blow it
away. The first program I got cost $40 and was a piece of junk...it would not let you select the sky
view from anyplace on earth as advertised on the box, just from a very small list of cities. It was clunky
and hard to use, and offered a very confusing sky view.

Then I spotted Swift Guide to the Galaxy for $10; I figured it could not be worse and might be better,
and I was willing to gamble that amount. It turned out to work pretty much as expected. It allows views
from any time or spot on earth, searching for a particular star, planet or constellation, and real time
motion--all things that Commodore's tiny Sky Travel program have offered for over 10 years. It beats
Sky Travel with a nice set of planet pictures and a display of all positions of the moon for any month
selected. However, when you ask to see an object that is below the horizon, it will not display it (you
would have to move to another part of the earth). Sky Travel shows the object with shading that
indicates you are looking down "through" the earth. This gives you an idea if Orion is going to be rising
into view soon; whereas Swift Guide makes you hunt around till you position yourself where (and
when) it is actually in the sky. Overall Swift Guide is a flashier program, and setting the time and
location is a lot faster. But considering its use of the C64's small memory, Sky Travel does not have to
take a back seat in any way.

(Via the Commodore Information Center, http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)