LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

Post by bilegeek » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 1:37 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #79

jhbadger wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone has brought up, Transputers (an early parallel architecture) was a thing in the 1980s because people thought CPU speed was reaching a plateau. They were kind of right (which is why modern CPUs are multicore) but were a decade or so too early so transputers failed in the market.

CPU cores are still getting faster, but not at the 1980/90s cadence. We get away with that because the cores have been good enough for a decade - unless you are doing heavy data crunching, the cores will spend most of the time waiting for you to do something. I sometimes produce video and the only times I hear the fans turning on is when I am encoding content. And even then, as long as ffmpeg runs with `nice -n 19`,…

Post by vardump » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #61

Aurornis wrote: post #50

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. 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…

This is probably me experiencing a simulacra but with that slow loading getting up to go get a drink workflow, each page load was more special. It was magical discovering new websites just like trying out new software by picking something up from those "pegboards" at computer stores. It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bu…

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:04 AM UTC

canpan wrote: post #132

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…

The GameBoy Advance could run 2D games (and some 3D demos) on 2 AA batteries for 16 hours. I wonder if we could get something more efficient with modern tech? It seems research made things faster but more power hungry. We compensate with better batteries instead. I guess we can and it's a design goal problem, I also do love a screen with backlight.

Post by lich_king » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:33 AM UTC

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.

Post by vardump » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #53

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.

I always think the Core 2 Duo was the inflexion point for me. Before that current software always seemed to struggle on current hardware but after it was generally fine. As much as I like my Apple Silicon Mac I could do everything I need to on 2008 hardware.