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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#171

Post by aa-jv »

rbanffy wrote: post #168
aa-jv wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NextStep looked pretty dated too, but it went through a nice evolution to bring it up to modern design standards .. if SGI had made that laptop and increased their marketshare I'm pretty sure Irix would've gotten a face-lift.

Anyway, its all about that alternative-universe, where the success of the SGI tiBook has everyone running Irix in their pockets ..

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#172

Post by Someone »

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…

> 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

A point for discussion is whether image-based systems are the same kind of thing as OSes where system and applications are separate things, but if we include them, Smalltalk-80 is better in that regard. It doesn’t require you to reboot to install a new version of your patch (if you’re very careful, that’s sometimes possible in classic Mac OS, too, but it definitely is harder) and is/has an IDE that fully supports it.

Lisp systems and Self also have better support for it, I think.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#173

Post by Someone »

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.)

> unless you had a non-stock debugger attached and can run ExitToShell

You could also directly jump into the ExitToShell code in ROM (G 49F6D8, IIRC). Later versions of Minibug had an “es” command that more or less did the same thing (that direct jump always jumps into the ROM code, “es” would, I think, jump to any patched versions)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#174

Post by myself248 »

fhars wrote: post #71
drob518 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how pervasive OC3 would have gotten. A 1080p video stream is only about 7 Mbps today.

You only have to bundle about 110 ISDN channels to transfer that (four E1 or five T1 trunk lines).

Right, but point is, assume the "backbone" never got fast enough to have a million subscribers all doing that at once.

I remember a subscriber T1 costing 4 figures per month, and I don't think it's because the copper pairs themselves were any different. (They weren't. As long as they didn't have bridge-taps, it was just plain old pairs. The repeaters every few kilofeet were not that expensive either.)

I remember the early-90s internet guidance that idle traffic like keepalive pings was discouraged, especially if you were sending traffic overseas, because it cluttered up the backbone links with packets that weren't actually valuable, and that was rude / abusive. Presumably edge CDNs would've still happened (or, ISPs providing Usenet servers basically did a lot of that already), but you simply wouldn't be doing video over the internet at large because the bandwidth charges would kill you.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#175

Post by Someone »

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.

> Would we still get web browsers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) is from the 1960s, so, technically, it certainly is possible. Whether it would make sense commercially to support a billion users would depend on whether we would stay stuck on prices of the eighties, too.

Also, there’s mobile usage. I would it be possible to build a mobile network with thousands of users per km² with tech from the eighties?

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#176

Post by rbanffy »

aa-jv wrote: post #171
rbanffy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

NextStep looked pretty dated too, but it went through a nice evolution to bring it up to modern design standards .. if SGI had made that laptop and increased their marketshare I'm pretty sure Irix would've gotten a face-lift. Anyway, its all about that alternative-universe, where the success of the SGI tiBook has everyone running Irix in their pockets ..

When NeXT acquired Apple (for one Steve Jobs, getting $400 million as change) OPENSTEP was not dated - it still looked impressive next to MacOS 9 and Windows. And CDE, of course, but that’s a very low bar.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#177

Post by aa-jv »

rbanffy wrote: post #176
aa-jv wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NextStep looked pretty dated too, but it went through a nice evolution to bring it up to modern design standards .. if SGI had made that laptop and increased their marketshare I'm pretty sure Irix would've gotten a face-lift. Anyway, its all about that alternative-universe, where the success of the SGI tiBook has everyone running Irix in their pockets ..

When NeXT acquired Apple (for one Steve Jobs, getting $400 million as change) OPENSTEP was not dated - it still looked impressive next to MacOS 9 and Windows. And CDE, of course, but that’s a very low bar.

It didn't look as great as Irix did back then, though ..

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#178

Post by p0w3n3d »

wkjagt wrote: post #114
zahlman wrote: post #48

> 46K RAM Not 64? (Edit: I see part of the address space is reserved for ROM, but it still seems a bit wonky.)

The 6502 doesn't have separate io addresses so you need to fit all devices in a 64k space, not just ROM.

Atari 130XE used bank switching to handle more memory along with the IO-reserved memory (i.e. you had an address $D301 where you would change bits for the memory bank, and it would redirect $4000 – $7FFF to another bank in the extended memory)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#179

Post by p0w3n3d »

ggm wrote: post #123
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…

I wrote (mostly copied from printed code and altered) games in BASIC. Too bad I had not enough understanding what could have been done in the assembly language... Now I keep rediscovering them, but it's only for the sake of nostalgia (and personal development)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#180

Post by vidarh »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #87
p_ing wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The young WWW had garish flashing banner ads.

The young web had no ads at all.

For a very narrow definition of "the young web".

The period without ads lasted ~4 years, during which almost nobody used the web, and even fewer used a graphical browser.

Mosaic 0.5 was first released in January '93 (yes, there were other graphical browsers preceding it, like Viola, but none saw broad distribution)

Netscape was first launched in October '94.

By '94 the first banner ads existed.

DoubleClick started selling banner ads in '95.

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