181–190 of 226 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ..
That and powering their GUI to Linux.
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.
Edit: oh I thought you meant if we were stuck in 6502 style stuff. With megabytes of ram we'd be able to do a lot more. When I was studying we ran 20 X terminals with ncsa mosaic on a server with a few CPUs and 128GB RAM or so. Graphic browsing would be fine.
Only when Java and JavaScript came on the scene things got unbearably slow. I guess in that scenario most processing would have stayed server-side.
The extended graphics commands seem to allow X/Y positioning with an 8-bit color.
I think the picture shows an 80x25 screen?
What gives here? Anyone know what's going on?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the modern web is very bloted and to the actual experinece isn't much different. Of course some of that bloat does more, but much of it isn't
If you want to complain about the state of modern web, you can just do it. You don't need to spin up a story about how the old internet was faster than it actually was. This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.
Wait, there is an 800x480 display connected, but the thing only has 46k of RAM. There's no explanation of the display approach being used. The extended graphics commands seem to allow X/Y positioning with an 8-bit color. I think the picture shows an 80x25 screen? What gives here? Anyone know what's going on?
EDIT: I can now see that is does have bit mapped graphics. It must have a built-in serial like terminal with graphics capabilities.
EDIT2: Probably using this chip: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1590
:-)
Wait, there is an 800x480 display connected, but the thing only has 46k of RAM. There's no explanation of the display approach being used. The extended graphics commands seem to allow X/Y positioning with an 8-bit color. I think the picture shows an 80x25 screen? What gives here? Anyone know what's going on?
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…
> 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.
And it wasn’t just theming. Classic Mac OS extensions could do anything from add support for new hardware to overhaul the text rendering system entirely to giving dragged desktop icons gravity and inertia to adding a taskbar or a dock. The sky was the limit, and having a single common target to do any of those things (vs. being split between the kernel and a thousand layers/daemons/DEs/etc) meant that if it could be done, it probably had been.
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…
It would probably need a decent memory controller, since it wouldn't be able to dedicate 32 pins for a data bus, loads and stores would need to be done wither 8 or 16 bits at a time, depending on how many pins you want to use for that..
It always mildly tickles me when retrocomputer designs use anachronistic processors way more powerful than the CPU in their design - in this case, there’s a ATmega644 as a keyboard controller (64K ROM - although only 4K RAM, up to 20MHz) and presumably something pretty powerful in the display board.