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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#161

Post by bitwize »

rbanffy wrote: post #108
bitwize wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netscape was talking about making the Web an app platform to replace Microsoft Windows even way back then. The world we're living in today is exactly what they envisioned.

Electron wouldn’t be possible back then.

Electron was effectively invented by Microsoft in 1999:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

Which is funny, because HTML, Java, and JavaScript were being talked about as an app platform a few years before then, precisely to prevent Microsoft from drinking everybody's milkshake on the desktop.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#163

Post by aa-jv »

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…

The alternative reality I wish we could move to, across the universe, is the one where SGI were the first to build a titanium laptop and became the worlds #1 Unix laptop vendor ..

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#164

Post by iberator »

vidarh wrote: post #35
iberator wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are wrong. Windows 3.11 era used CPUs with like 33mhz cpu, and yet we had TONS of graphical applications. Including web browsers, Photoshop, CAD, Excel and instant messangers Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.

I don't see how this contradicts any of what they said, unless they've edited their comment. You're right we had graphical apps, but we did also have very little video. CuSeeMe existed - video conferencing would've still been a thing, but with limited resolution due to bandwidth constraints. Video in general was an awful low res mess and would have remained so if most people were limited to ISDN speeds. While there w…

i remember watching adult videos on windows 3.11 with 486dx 100mhz. CD-ROM VIDEO thing. I guess it was just just mpeg2 format

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#165

Post by rbanffy »

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…

> Not really general user accessible.

Writing a MacOS classic extension wasn’t exactly easy. Debugging one could be a nightmare.

I’m not sure how GTK themes are done now, but they used to be very easy to make.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#166

Post by rbanffy »

nxobject wrote: post #149
Aurornis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems research made things faster but more power hungry No, modern CPUs are far more power efficient for the same compute. The primary power draw in a simple handheld console like would be the screen and sound. Putting an equivalent MCU on a modern process into that console would make the CPU power consumption so low as to be negligible.

As a consumer product example: e-ink readers. (Of course, it helps as well that the GameBoy had no radios etc...)

E-ink use energy when changing state. A 30fps 3D game would require a lot of energy. Also, e-ink is electromechanical in nature, so there would be a lot of wear as well.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#167

Post by Gibbon1 »

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 was doing Schematic Capture and Layout on a 486 with one two three four five six seven eight 8 megabytes of RAM ah haha.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#168

Post by rbanffy »

aa-jv wrote: post #163
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 alternative reality I wish we could move to, across the universe, is the one where SGI were the first to build a titanium laptop and became the worlds #1 Unix laptop vendor ..

I love the IRIX look, but they’d need to update it past the 1990s. It’d look very dated to current audiences.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#169

Post by raverbashing »

vardump wrote: post #159
raverbashing wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not confusing anything, it was the marketing that was confusing

Of course you're correct and a 56k modem is something like 8k Baud, but in marketing the bigger number usually wins

And up until the 2400bps modems IIRC bauds and bps were interchangeable

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#170

Post by rbanffy »

rahkiin wrote: post #49
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…

Given enough power and space efficiency you would start putting multiple cpus together for specialized tasks. Distributed computing could have looked differently

This is what the Mac effectively does now - background tasks run on low-power cores, keeping the fast ones free for the interactive tasks. More specialised ARM processors have 3 or more tiers, and often have cores with different ISAs (32 and 64 bit ones). Current PC architectures are already very distributed - your GPU, NIC/DPU, and NVMe SSD all run their own OSs internally, and most of the time don’t expose any programmability to the main OS. You could, for instance, offload filesystem logic or compression to the NVMe controller, freeing the main CPU from having to run it. Same could be done for a NIC - it could manage remote filesystem mounts and only expose a high-level file interface to the OS.

The downside would be we’d have to think about binary compatibility between different platforms from different vendors. Anyway, it’d be really interesting to see what we could do.

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