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LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

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Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#71

Post by fhars »

drob518 wrote: post #39
myself248 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And imagine if telecom had topped out around ISDN somewhere, with perhaps OC-3 (155Mbps) for the bleeding-fastest network core links. We'd probably get MP3 but not video to any great or compelling degree. Mostly-text web, perhaps more gopher-like. Client-side stuff would have to be very compact, I wonder if NAPLPS would've taken off. Screen reader software would probably love that timeline.

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).

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#72

Post by b112 »

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.

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 could be thought of as a text browser, really.

I even connectd to CompuServe in the early 80s via my C64 through "datapac", a dial gateway via telnet.

ANSI was a standard too, it could have evolved further.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#73

Post by b112 »

rahkiin wrote: post #49
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…

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

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

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#74

Post by rbanffy »

rahkiin wrote: post #49
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…

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

This is more or less what we have now. Even a very pedestrian laptop has 8 cores. If 10 years ago you wanted to develop software for today’s laptop, you’d get a 32-gigabyte 8-core machine with a high-end GPU. And a very fast RAID system to get close to an NVMe drive.

Computers have been “fast enough” for a very long time now. I recently retired a Mac not because it was too slow but because the OS is no longer getting security patches. While their CPUs haven’t gotten twice as fast for single-threaded code every couple years, cores have become more numerous and extracting performance requires writing code that distributes functionality well across increasingly larger core pools.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#75

Post by petra »

myself248 wrote: post #7
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.

And imagine if telecom had topped out around ISDN somewhere, with perhaps OC-3 (155Mbps) for the bleeding-fastest network core links. We'd probably get MP3 but not video to any great or compelling degree. Mostly-text web, perhaps more gopher-like. Client-side stuff would have to be very compact, I wonder if NAPLPS would've taken off. Screen reader software would probably love that timeline.

It's probably possible to develop analog adsl chips in 1990 semi tech. But pretty difficult.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#76

Post by rbanffy »

b112 wrote: post #73
rahkiin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 pressed a key, IBM systems offloaded that to the terminals, that kept one or more screens in memory, and sent the data to another computer, a terminal controller, that would, then, and only then, disturb the all important mainframe with the mundane needs or its users.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#77

Post by jecel »

vardump wrote: post #16
kaashif wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's really a credible alternate reality where Moore's law just stops like that when it was in full swing. The ones that "could have happened" IMO are the transistor never being invented, or even mechanical computers becoming much more popular much earlier (there's a book about this alternate reality, The Difference Engine). I don't think transistors being invented was that certain to happen, we coul…

When MC68030 (1986) was introduced, I remember reading how computers probably won't get much faster, because PCB signal integrity would not allow further improvements. People that time were not actually sure how long the improvements would go on.

We were stuck with 33MHz PCBs for a long time as people kept trying and failing to get 50MHz PCBs to work. Then Intel came out with the 486DX2 which allowed you to run a 50MHz processor with an external 25MHz bus (so a 25MHz PCB) and we started moving forward again, though we did eventually get PCBs to go much faster as well.

The Transputers (mentioned in other comments) had already decoupled the core speed from the bus speed and Chuck Moore got a patent for doing this in his second Forth processor[1], which patent trolls later used to extract money from Intel and others (a little of which went to Chuck and allowed him to design a few more generations of Forth processors).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_(microprocessor)

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#78

Post by keyringlight »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #53
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 always think the Core 2 Duo was the inflexion point for me. Before that current software always seemed to struggle on current hardware but after it was generally fine. As much as I like my Apple Silicon Mac I could do everything I need to on 2008 hardware.

Alongside the power of a single core, that was alongside adoption of multicore and moving from 32 to 64 bit for the general user, which enabled greater than 4GB memory and lots of processes to co-exist more gracefully.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#79

Post by rbanffy »

jhbadger wrote: post #21
kaashif wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's really a credible alternate reality where Moore's law just stops like that when it was in full swing. The ones that "could have happened" IMO are the transistor never being invented, or even mechanical computers becoming much more popular much earlier (there's a book about this alternate reality, The Difference Engine). I don't think transistors being invented was that certain to happen, we coul…

As someone has brought up, Transputers (an early parallel architecture) was a thing in the 1980s because people thought CPU speed was reaching a plateau. They were kind of right (which is why modern CPUs are multicore) but were a decade or so too early so transputers failed in the market.

CPU cores are still getting faster, but not at the 1980/90s cadence. We get away with that because the cores have been good enough for a decade - unless you are doing heavy data crunching, the cores will spend most of the time waiting for you to do something. I sometimes produce video and the only times I hear the fans turning on is when I am encoding content. And even then, as long as ffmpeg runs with `nice -n 19`, I continue working normally as if I had the computer all to myself.

Re: LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

#80

Post by rbanffy »

jecel wrote: post #77
vardump wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When MC68030 (1986) was introduced, I remember reading how computers probably won't get much faster, because PCB signal integrity would not allow further improvements. People that time were not actually sure how long the improvements would go on.

We were stuck with 33MHz PCBs for a long time as people kept trying and failing to get 50MHz PCBs to work. Then Intel came out with the 486DX2 which allowed you to run a 50MHz processor with an external 25MHz bus (so a 25MHz PCB) and we started moving forward again, though we did eventually get PCBs to go much faster as well. The Transputers (mentioned in other comments) had already decoupled the core speed from the…

> We were stuck with 33MHz PCBs for a long time as people kept trying and failing to get 50MHz PCBs to work.

What is the current best symbol rates we get on PCB traces? I know we’ve been multiplexing a lot of channels using the same tricks we used with modems to get above 9600bps on POTS.

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