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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#191

Post by rainingmonkey »

galangalalgol wrote: post #126
b112 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had web browsers, kinda, in that we'd call up BBSes, and use ansi for menus and such. My Vic20 could do this, and a C64 easily, really it was just graphics that were wanting. I was sending electronic messages around the world via FidoNet and PunterNet, downloaded software, was on forums, and that all on BBSes. When I think of the web of old, it's the actual information I love. And a terminal connected to a bbs cou…

Heavy webpages are the main barrier for projects like this. We need something that is just reader view for everything without the overhead of also being able to do non reader view. Like w3m or lynx but with sane formatting, word wrap etc.

You might be interested in the Gemini protocol: https://geminiprotocol.net/

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#192

Post by galangalalgol »

rainingmonkey wrote: post #191
galangalalgol wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy webpages are the main barrier for projects like this. We need something that is just reader view for everything without the overhead of also being able to do non reader view. Like w3m or lynx but with sane formatting, word wrap etc.

You might be interested in the Gemini protocol: https://geminiprotocol.net/

I am interested, thank you! I still think there is room to make a text browser that allows as many webpages as possible to be usable without requiring MB of ram per page. You can do things piping curl through pandoc but that isn't terribly useful.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#193

Post by drob518 »

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 a T3 could have handled multiple.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#194

Post by ksherlock »

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.

There is an alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties. It's called 1990.

Anyhow, the WWW was invented in 1989/1990 on a 25Mhz 68040 NextCube. Strictly speaking, the 68040 and NextCube weren't released until 1990 (and the NeXT was an expensive machine) but they were in development in 1989 so that's not a stretch. Anyhow, WWW isn't really much more than hypercard (1987) with networking.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#195

Post by drob518 »

myself248 wrote: post #174
fhars wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You would still have video happening, but it would not be the type we have today (streaming arbitrary full-length movies from a nearly infinite catalog and YouTube). It would be used for big events and things like that. We might still have gotten podcasting, though.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#196

Post by komodo99 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #182
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.

No, if we had the web it would be more like what gopher was. Or maybe lynx. 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…

Of course it was fast with that much ram, you'd just cache the entire interwebs. /s

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#197

Post by JPLeRouzic »

user3939382 wrote: post #60

I love this! I’ve been working on a 6502 kernel. I have an arch trick to give the 6502 tons of memory so it can do a kind of Genera-like babashka lisp machine.

> "I have an arch trick to give the 6502 tons of memory"

Please, what is your trick, is it a variation on bank memories?

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#199

Post by cogman10 »

lelanthran wrote: post #158
kittbuilds wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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].

I'd go look at the start date for all these languages. Except for C#, which was a direct response to the Sun lawsuit, all these languages spawned in the early 90s.

Had processor speed and memory advanced slower, I don't think you see these languages go away, I see they just end up being used for different things or in different ways.

JavaOS, in particular, probably would have had more success. Seeing an entire OS written in and for a language with a garbage collector to make sure memory isn't wasted would have been much more appealing.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#200

Post by LeFantome »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #189
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…

My alternate reality "one of these days" projects is to have a RISC-V RV32E core on a small FPGA (or even emulated by a different SOC) that sits on a 40- or 64-pin DIP carrier board, ready to be plugged into a breadboard. You could create a Ben Eater-style small computer around this, with RAM, a UART, maybe something like the VERA board from the Commander X16... It would probably need a decent memory controller, sinc…

The really cool thing about RISC-V is that you can design your own core and get full access to a massive software ecosystem.

All you need is RV32I.

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