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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#111

Post by nxobject »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #93
antidamage wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved System 7 for its simplicity yet all of the potential it had for individual developers. Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.

The Classic Mac OS model in general I think is the best that has been or ever will be in terms of sheer practical user power/control/customization thanks to its extension and control panel based architecture. Sure, it was a security nightmare, but there was practically nothing that couldn’t be achieved by installing some combination of third party extensions. Even modern desktop Linux pales in comparison because alth…

I’m not too nostalgic for an OS that only had cooperative scheduling. I don’t miss the days of Conflict Catcher, or having to order my extensions correctly. Illegal instruction? Program accessed a dangling pointer? Bomb message held up your own computer and you had to restart (unless you had a non-stock debugger attached and can run ExitToShell, but no promises there.)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#112

Post by bluGill »

Aurornis wrote: post #107
bluGill wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My clim is that the modern web is bloated. I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. I avoided dialup if I could because it was slow. Even isdn was okay speeds.

> My clim is that the modern web is bloated. Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs. > I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting. There are a lot of weird cl…

the modern web is very bloted and to the actual experinece isn't much different. Of course some of that bloat does more, but much of it isn't

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#113

Post by aleph_minus_one »

rbanffy wrote: post #110
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 did not contain Cardfile. :-(

Didn’t it have a proper address book? I remember I could send faxes through Mail.

> Didn’t it have a proper address book?

Schedule+, which was contained in Windows for Workgroups 3.11, contained address book functionalities that were clearly better than Cardfile.

But people used Cardfile for many other different purposes than serving as an address book.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#115

Post by fragmede »

Aurornis wrote: post #50
bluGill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.

> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get. No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow . Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember…

Wirths law in effect.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#116

Post by nxobject »

kittbuilds wrote: post #88
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the interesting alternate reality is where CPUs got stuck in the 200-400mhz range for speed, but somehow continued to become more efficient. It’s kind of the ideal combination in some ways. It’s fast enough to competently run a nice desktop GUI, but not so fast that you can get overly fancy with it. Eventually you’d end up OSes that look like highly refined versions of System 7.6/Mac OS 8 or Windows 2000, whic…

There's something to this. The 200-400MHz era was roughly where hardware capability and software ambition were in balance — the OS did what you asked, no more. What killed that balance wasn't raw speed, it was cheap RAM. Once you could throw gigabytes at a problem, the incentive to write tight code disappeared. Electron exists because memory is effectively free. An alternate timeline where CPUs got efficient but RAM…

Lots of good practices! I remember how aggressively iPhoneOS would kill your application when you got close to being out of physical memory, or how you had to quickly serialize state when the user switched apps (no background execution, after all!) And, or better or for worse, it was native code because you couldn’t and still can’t get a “good enough” JITing language.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#117

Post by cosmic_cheese »

nxobject wrote: post #111
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Classic Mac OS model in general I think is the best that has been or ever will be in terms of sheer practical user power/control/customization thanks to its extension and control panel based architecture. Sure, it was a security nightmare, but there was practically nothing that couldn’t be achieved by installing some combination of third party extensions. Even modern desktop Linux pales in comparison because alth…

I’m not too nostalgic for an OS that only had cooperative scheduling. I don’t miss the days of Conflict Catcher, or having to order my extensions correctly. Illegal instruction? Program accessed a dangling pointer? Bomb message held up your own computer and you had to restart (unless you had a non-stock debugger attached and can run ExitToShell, but no promises there.)

It had major flaws for sure, but also some excellent concepts that I wish could've found a way to survive through to the modern day. Modern operating systems may be stable and secure, but they're also far more complex, inflexible, generic, and inaccessible and don't empower users to anywhere near the extent they could.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#118

Post by pibaker »

bluGill wrote: post #112
Aurornis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My clim is that the modern web is bloated. Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs. > I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting. There are a lot of weird cl…

the modern web is very bloted and to the actual experinece isn't much different. Of course some of that bloat does more, but much of it isn't

If you want to complain about the state of modern web, you can just do it. You don't need to spin up a story about how the old internet was faster than it actually was.

This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#119

Post by PostOnce »

alexisread wrote: post #41
vardump wrote: post #2

I sometimes wonder what the alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties would look like. We might have had to manage with just a few MB of RAM and efficient ARM cores running at maybe 30 MHz or so. Would we still get web browsers? How about the rest of the digital transformation? One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

Apart from transputers mentioned already, there’s https://greenarrays.com/home/documents/g144apps.php Both the hardware and the forth software. APIs in a B2B style would likely be much more prevalent, less advertising (yay!) and less money in the internet so more like the original internet I guess. GUIs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS Show that we could have had q…

I want to chime in on SymbOS, which I think is the perfect reply to the GP's curiosity.

https://www.symbos.org/shots.htm

This is what slow computers with a few hundred kB of RAM can do.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#120

Post by nxobject »

peterfirefly wrote: post #23
bluGill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.

It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.

> The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.

Because all of the complicated client side stuff was in Java applets or Shockwave :( Pepperidge Farm remembers having to wait 10 minutes for a GameBoy emulator to load to play Pokémon Yellow on school computers…

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