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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#41

Post by alexisread »

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.

Apart from transputers mentioned already, there’s https://greenarrays.com/home/documents/g144apps.php

Both the hardware and the forth software.

APIs in a B2B style would likely be much more prevalent, less advertising (yay!) and less money in the internet so more like the original internet I guess.

GUIs like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS

Show that we could have had quality desktops and mobile devices

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#42

Post by dheera »

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?

Yes, just that they would not run millions of lines of JavaScript for some social media tracking algorithm, newsletter signup, GDPR popup, newsletter popup, ad popup, etc. and you'd probably just be presented with the text only and at best a relevant static image or two. The web would be a place to get long-form information, sort of a massive e-book, not a battleground of corporations clamoring for 5 seconds of attention to make $0.05 off each of 500 million people's doom scrolling while on the toilet.

Web browsers existed back then, the web in the days of NCSA Mosaic was basically exactly the above

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#45

Post by szundi »

peterfirefly wrote: post #23
bluGill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.

It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.

[dead]

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#46

Post by romperstomper »

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.

> One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#47

Post by graemep »

peterfirefly wrote: post #23
bluGill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.

It crashed a lot more, the fonts (and screens) were uglier, and Javascript was a lot slower. The good thing was that there was very little Javascript.

I cannot recall crashes being a problem.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#49

Post by rahkiin »

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…

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

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#50

Post by Aurornis »

bluGill wrote: post #18
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 remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.

> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz.

I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get.

No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.

It’s silly to claim that 90s web browsers ran about as fast as they do today.

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