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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#121

Post by ksherlock »

II2II wrote: post #109
graemep wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot recall crashes being a problem.

I remember Netscape Navigator crashing, taking Solaris down with it. I could only imagine what it was like on Windows 9x. I don't want to imagine what Windows 3.x users endured. Windows 3.x was the OS where people saved early and saved often, since the lack of proper memory protection meant that a bad application (or worse, a bad driver) could BSOD the system at any time.

I once did an April Fool's spoof of netscape that displayed a wait cursor for 2 minutes then a bomb alert. For classic Mac, it was 90% accurate with only 1% the disk footprint.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#122

Post by nxobject »

romperstomper wrote: post #46
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.

> One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible. Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)

Honestly, I think we could’ve pulled off a lot earlier if GPU development had invested in GPGPU earlier.

I can see it now… the a national lab can run ImageNet, but it takes so many nodes with unobtanium 3dfx stuff that you have to wait 24 hours for a run to be scheduled and completed.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#123

Post by ggm »

HardwareLust wrote: post #103

Serious question; Why 6502?

BBC Micro, Acorn Atom, Commadore PET. all kinds of home computer. So prime retro material late 70s early 80s. There's a CP/M port. So you can use PIP which traces it's lineage back to the DEC Tops-10 operating system if not beforehand (its a peripheral IO command model, although I think CP/M PIP only shares name)

Add a DIN plug and record programs in Kansas City Standard on a cassette recorder. Could be a walkman. A floppy (full 8" type) was a luxury. Almost a megabyte! imagine what you can do.. when a program is the amount of text you can fit in the VBI of a ceefax/teletext broadcast, or is typed in by hand in hex. Kansas city standard is 300 bits/second and the tape plays in real-time so a standard C60 is like 160kb on both sides if you were lucky: it misread and miswrote a LOT.

I used to do tabular GOTO jump table text adventures, and use XOR screen line drawing to do moving moire pattern interference fringes. "mod scene" trippy graphics!

Thats a mandelbrot in ASCII, the best I've seen, on the web page. Super stuff.

People wrote tiny languages for the 6502. integer only but C like syntax, or Pascal or ALGOL. People did real science in BASIC, a one weekend course got you what you needed to do some maths for a Masters or PHD in some non CS field.

My friends did a lot more of this than me. Because I had access to a Dec-10 and a PDP-11 at work and later Vax/VMS and BSD UNIX systems, I didn't see the point of home machines. A wave I wish I'd ridden but not seeing the future emerge has been a constant failure of mine.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#124

Post by nicksergeant »

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.

You should definitely watch Maniac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#125

Post by shrubble »

ekaryotic wrote: post #4

neat. not something i´d hanker for. i saw a 16 core z80 laptop years ago and i often think about it because it can multitask. https://hackaday.com/2019/12/10/laptop-like-its-1979-with-a-...

The follow on to CPM which ran on the Z80 is MPM which is a multitasking OS.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#126

Post by galangalalgol »

b112 wrote: post #72
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.

We had web browsers, kinda, in that we'd call up BBSes, and use ansi for menus and such. My Vic20 could do this, and a C64 easily, really it was just graphics that were wanting. I was sending electronic messages around the world via FidoNet and PunterNet, downloaded software, was on forums, and that all on BBSes. When I think of the web of old, it's the actual information I love. And a terminal connected to a bbs cou…

Heavy webpages are the main barrier for projects like this. We need something that is just reader view for everything without the overhead of also being able to do non reader view. Like w3m or lynx but with sane formatting, word wrap etc.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#127

Post by grvbck »

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.

> One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

We had ELIZA, and that was enough for people to anthropomorphize their teletype terminals.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#129

Post by voxelghost »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #33
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.

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…

Or if 640k was not only all you'd ever need, it was all we'd ever get.
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