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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#211

Post by kjs3 »

rbanffy wrote: post #76
b112 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the Amiga. Custom coprpcessors for sound, video, etc.

Commodore 64 and Ataris had intelligent peripherals. Commodore’s drive knew about the filesystem and could stream the contents of a file to the computer without the computer ever becoming aware of where the files were on the disk. They also could copy data from one disk to another without the computer being involved. Mainframes are also like that - while a PDP-11 would be interrupted every time a user at a terminal p…

Ya...IBM and CDC both had/have architectures that heavily distributed tasks to subprocessors of various sorts. Pretty much dates to the invention of large-scale computers.

You also have things like the IBM Cell processor from PS3 days: a PowerPC 'main' processor with 7 "Synergistic Processing Elements" that could be offloaded to. The SPEs were kinda like the current idea of 'big/small processors' a la ARM, except SPEs are way dumber and much harder to program.

Of course, specialized math, cryptographic and compression processors have been around forever. And you can even look at something like SCSI, where virtually all of the intelligence for working the drive was offloaded to the drive ccontroller.

Lots of ways the implement this idea.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#212

Post by anticodon »

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?

There was Lynx text browser that was ported even to MS-DOS. I was using it until about 2010. It was a great browser until websites become unusable.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#213

Post by lawn »

deckar01 wrote: post #51

3D printer beds have been getting bigger, but slicers don’t seem to account for curling as large prints cool. The problem is long linear runs on bottom infill and perimeters shrinking. I’ve been cutting my large parts into puzzle like shapes, but printing them fully assembled. This adds curved perimeters throughout the bottom layer, reducing the distance stress can travel before finding a seam to deform. That said, a…

With proper bed leveling, meshing, chamber temperature, ears/brim, and glue this shouldn't be a big issue.

What printer are you using?

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#214

Post by deckar01 »

lawn wrote: post #213
deckar01 wrote: post #51

3D printer beds have been getting bigger, but slicers don’t seem to account for curling as large prints cool. The problem is long linear runs on bottom infill and perimeters shrinking. I’ve been cutting my large parts into puzzle like shapes, but printing them fully assembled. This adds curved perimeters throughout the bottom layer, reducing the distance stress can travel before finding a seam to deform. That said, a…

With proper bed leveling, meshing, chamber temperature, ears/brim, and glue this shouldn't be a big issue. What printer are you using?

Prusa XL with higher temp filament, not enclosed. I was making parts that spanned corner to corner. It works fine once I prevent it from making 400mm linear runs.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#215

Post by cogman10 »

lelanthran wrote: post #210
cogman10 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 se…

> 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. I don't understand your point here - I did not say those languages came only after 2000, I said they would have been relegated to history if they didn't become usable due to hardware increases. Remember that Java was not designed as a enterprise/server l…

> I said they would have been relegated to history if they didn't become usable due to hardware increases.

And I disagree with this assessment. These languages became popular before they were fast or the hardware support was mature. They may have taken different evolution routes, but they still found themselves useful.

Python, for example, entered in a world where perl was being used for one off scripts in the shell. Python replacing perl would have still happened because the performance characteristics of it (and what perl replaced, bash scripts) is similar. We may not have used python or ruby as web backends because they were too slow for that purpose. That, however, doesn't mean we wouldn't have used them for all sorts of other tasks including data processing.

> Remember that Java was not designed as a enterprise/server language. Sun pivoted when it failed at its original task (set top boxes). It was only able to pivot due to hardware performance increases.

Right, but the java of old was extremely slow compared to today's Java. The JVM for Java 1 to 1.4 was dogshit. It wasn't hardware that made it fast.

Yet still, java was pretty popular even without a fast JVM and JIT. Hotspot would have still likely happened but maybe the GC would have evolved differently as the current crop of GC algorithms trade memory for performance. In a constrained environment Java may have never adopted moving collectors and instead relied on Go like collection strategies.

Java applets were a thing in the 90s even though hardware was slow and memory constrained. That's because the JVM was simply a different beast in that era. One better suited to the hardware at the time.

Even today, Java runs on hardware that is roughly 80s quality (see Java Card). It's deployed on very limited hardware.

What you are mistaking is the modern JVM's performance characteristics for Java's requirements for running. The JVM evolved with hardware and made tradeoffs appropriate for Java's usage and hardware capabilities.

I remember the early era of the internet. I ran Java applets in my netscape and IE browsers on a computer with 32MB of ram and a 233MHz processor. It was fine.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#216

Post by rbanffy »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #188
rbanffy wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right, but my point is that users didn’t have to write extensions because developers had already written one for just about any niche use one could think of. 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…

You’d need to touch many different parts of the OS to write those extensions. The difference is that, on MacOS classic, there isn’t much of a boundary between user space and kernel space.

I’ve done a couple MITM toys with Windows 3.x and the trick is always exposing the same interface as the thing you want to replace, even if you only do something like inverting mouse movements on odd minutes, you just pass everything else down to the original module.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#217

Post by muyuu »

Someone wrote: post #172
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…

> 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 pa…

smalltalk missed the opportunity to incorporate more sophisticated versioning, including distributed versioning with current SotA ideas

of course modern smalltalks or st-inspired systems could still incorporate these ideas

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#219

Post by myself248 »

drob518 wrote: post #195
myself248 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Podcasting distributed by NNTP would be so much more efficient than RSS and HTTP, too!

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#220

Post by cosmic_cheese »

cogman10 wrote: post #215
lelanthran wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't understand your point here - I did not say those languages came only after 2000, I said they would have been relegated to history if they didn't become usable due to hardware increases. Remember that Java was not designed as a enterprise/server l…

> I said they would have been relegated to history if they didn't become usable due to hardware increases. And I disagree with this assessment. These languages became popular before they were fast or the hardware support was mature. They may have taken different evolution routes, but they still found themselves useful. Python, for example, entered in a world where perl was being used for one off scripts in the shell.…

I remember running Java applets under Netscape 3.x and 4.x on System 7.5 on a 200Mhz PPC 603ev and 16MB RAM. It was “fine” mostly, but loading was slow as mud (though that might’ve just been the 28k dialup) and they crashed Netscape or the whole system a lot more than the rest of the web did. Technically usable, but practicality was questionable.
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