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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#151

Post by DerekL »

vidarh wrote: post #38
intrasight wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we wouldn't have ads and tracking.

Prodigy launched online ads from the 1980s. AOL as well. HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994. DoubleClick was founded in 1995. Neither were limited to 90's hardware: Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.

I actually used an Amiga to browse the web, back in 1994 or 1995. I started with Lynx, but then I switched to a graphical browser (probably Mosaic).

This was an Amiga 500 with maxed-out RAM (8 MB) and a hard drive.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#152

Post by vardump »

raverbashing wrote: post #59
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…

Yeah slow? Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow

Those things always confuse me. I think 2400 baud modems were like 9600 bps? At least 56k modems were 8000 baud.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#153

Post by speedgoose »

flopsamjetsam wrote: post #82

I love the case material. What is it? It looks like what they make the bulk post boxes out of here (if you ship a lot of material via post, they give you these boxes to put them in to/from the delivery centre), or corflute material (election candidates posters around here).

Looks like 3D printed PLA.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#154

Post by raverbashing »

vardump wrote: post #152
raverbashing wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah slow? Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow

Those things always confuse me. I think 2400 baud modems were like 9600 bps? At least 56k modems were 8000 baud.

no, the other way

2400 were 300 bytes per second

(though it might be that 9600bps worked at the 'official definition' of 2400 baud but nobody advertised it like that)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#155

Post by DeathArrow »

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 sometimes wonder what the alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties would look like.

We would have seen much less desktop apps being written using Javascript frameworks.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#156

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#157

Post by ok_dad »

pibaker wrote: post #97
ok_dad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.

Why would you make an exception for download speed? It was the reason why the internet was slow back then. This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.

Cars have much more power today but generally don’t go much faster because they’re much heavier. Just because downloads are faster doesn’t mean the user experience is faster or more snappy. In fact, it might be worse. Quality doesn’t follow from quantity.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#158

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> 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.

I dunno if it was cheap RAM or just developer convenience. In one of my recent comments on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986999) I pointed out the performance difference in my 2001 desktop between a `ls` program written in Java at the time and the one that came with the distro.

Had processor speeds not increased at that time, Java would have been relegated to history, along with a lot of other languages that became mainstream and popular (Ruby, C#, Python)[1]. There was simply no way that companies would continue spending 6 - 8 times more on hardware for a specific workload.

C++ would have been the enterprise language solution (a new sort of hell!) and languages like Go (Native code with a GC) would have been created sooner.

In 1998-2005, computer speeds were increasing so fast there was no incentive to develop new languages. All you had to do was wait a few months for a program to run faster!

What we did was trade-off efficiency for developer velocity, and it was a good trade at the time. Since around 2010 performance increases have been dropping, and when faced with stagnant increases in hardware performance, new languages were created to address that (Rust, Zig, Go, Nim, etc).

-------------------------------

[1] It took two decades of constant work for those high-dev-velocity languages to reach some sort of acceptable performance. Some of them are still orders of magnitude slower.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#159

Post by vardump »

raverbashing wrote: post #154
vardump wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things always confuse me. I think 2400 baud modems were like 9600 bps? At least 56k modems were 8000 baud.

no, the other way 2400 were 300 bytes per second (though it might be that 9600bps worked at the 'official definition' of 2400 baud but nobody advertised it like that)

You seem to be confusing baud and bits per second. Baud is symbols per second. Usually one symbol represents multiple bits. AFAIK in 56k modems one symbol corresponds up to 7 bits.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#160

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> 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 visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded.

At home, when I was on dialup, certainly.

At work I did not experience this. Most pages loaded in Netscape navigator in about the same time that most pages load now - a few seconds.

> Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.

Well, yes, single-core, single-socket and single-processor meant that the computer could literally only do a single thing at a time, and yet the scrolling experience on most sites was still good enough to be better than the scrolling experience on some current React sites.

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