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, which sounds lovely.
I'm in the early phases of working on a game that explores that.
The backstory is that in the late 2050s when AI has its hands in everything, humans loose trust of it. There are a few high profile incidents - based on AI decisions -, which cause public opinion to change, and an initiative is brought in to ensure important systems run hardware and software that can be trusted and human reviewed.
A 16bit CPU architecture - with no pipelining, speculative execution etc is chosen, as it's powerful enough to run such systems, but also simple enough that a human can fully understand the hardware and software.
The goal is to make a near-future space exploration MMO. My Macbook Pro can simulate 3000 CPU cores simultaneously, and I have a lot of fun ideas for it. The irony is that I'm using LLMs to build it :D
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.
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.
I think the boring answer is that we waste computing resources simply because if memory and CPU cycles are abundant and cheap, developers don't find it worth their time to optimize nearly as much as they needed to optimize in the 1980s or 1990s.
Had we stopped with 1990s tech, I don't think that things would have been fundamentally different. 1980s would have been more painful, mostly because limited memory just did not allow for particularly sophisticated graphics. So, we'd be stuck with 16-color aesthetics and you probably wouldn't be watching movies or editing photos on your computer. That would mean a blow to social media and e-commerce too.
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.
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 could've got better vacuum tubes, or maybe something else.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) is from the 1960s, so, technically, it certainly is possible. Whether it would make sense commercially to support a billion users would depend on whether we would stay stuck on prices of the eighties, too.
Also, there’s mobile usage. I would it be possible to build a mobile network with thousands of users per km² with tech from the eighties?
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 in that scenario most processing would have stayed server-side.
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.
I like the 32 bit era because it's the only time we had symmetrical data and address buses. 32 bit data bus on chip. 32 bit addressable RAM, 4 GB. Used to be 8/16 and now it's 64/whatever. Understandable decisions given needs/constraints but sort of messy.
You'd probably get much more multiprocessor stuff much earlier. There's probably 2 or 3 really good interfaces to wire an almost arbitrary number of CPUs together and run some software across all of them (AMP not SMP).
Actually real AI isn’t going to be possible unless we return to this arch. Contemporary stacks are wasting 80% of their energy which we now need for AI. Graphics and videos are not a key or necessary part of most computing workflows.
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 retro laptop this thick would look really nice in stained wood.
I stop seeing those issues after starting using Bambulab X1 3d printer, it just works 99 percent of the time. My old ender 3 v2 had those issues due to bed changing its shape during printing(thin metal changing shape in micro level due to temp and mechanical stress with 4 knobs pulling down), not sticking well, not enough fast cooling or cooling effects bed temp profile, way off even with auto level probes. Also open 3d printer with bunch of air flow is a killer for those prints. OP should try Bambulab like enclosed more accurate 3d printer from a local 3d print shop or a hackerspace after locking the design and enclosure iterations.
Stunning work! Astounding progress since its under 3 months old from PCB to this result.
Funnily enough I've been musing this past month would I better separate work if I had a limited Amiga A1200 PC for anything other than work! This would nicely fit.
Please do submit to HackaDay I'm sure they'd salivate over this and it's amazing when you have the creator in the comments. Even if just to explain no a 555 wouldn't quite achieve the same result. No not even a 556...
The display controller they are using (RA8875 or RA8889) has several hundred KB of internal memory. So you can write to the screen and the image will "stay there" as it were, you don't have to store a framebuffer or keep writing out the image like with a CRT.
It probably has a character mapped display, so you can only display 256 different (ascii and graphics) characters in a memory mapped 80*25 = 2000 bytes display buffer.
EDIT: I can now see that is does have bit mapped graphics. It must have a built-in serial like terminal with graphics capabilities.
I implemented "multitasking" (well, two-tasking) between a BASIC program and native code on a Z80, using a "supervisor" driven by hardware interrupts. There's just so much you can pack in a 4MHz CPU with a 4-bit ALU (yes, not 8-bit). It worked for soft-realtime tasks, but would be a rather weak desktop.
Good timing. My current weekend project is constructing something similar to the the first third of Ben Eater's 6502 design (last weekend was the clock module plus some eccentricities).
It occurred to me that given the 6502's predictable clock cycle timings it should be possible to create a realtime disassembler using e.g. an Arduino Mega 2560+character lcd display attached to the 6502's address/data/etc pins.
Of course, this would only be useful in single-stepping/very slow clock speeds. Still, I think it could be useful in learning how the 6502 works.
Is there relevant prior work? I'm struggling with my google fu.
I was recently using this project. It outputs over serial which is handy for capturing a longer stream. I’m working on a wire wrapped 6502 machine and was getting a weird issue where I could see via the Sync pin that it was mis-executing a byte of data as an instruction instead. The fix was to add another decoupling capacitor next to the CPU…
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.
I love the case material. What is it? It looks like what they make the bulk post boxes out of here (if you ship a lot of material via post, they give you these boxes to put them in to/from the delivery centre), or corflute material (election candidates posters around here).
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.
It does not run Microsoft software at all, as far as I can tell. EhBasic isn't Microsoft Basic, ehbasic was written by Lee Davison. And this particular version was further enhanced (see github).
And wozmon was obviously written by Woz.. not Microsoft.
BBC Micro, Acorn Atom, Commadore PET. all kinds of home computer. So prime retro material late 70s early 80s. There's a CP/M port. So you can use PIP which traces it's lineage back to the DEC Tops-10 operating system if not beforehand (its a peripheral IO command model, although I think CP/M PIP only shares name)
Add a DIN plug and record programs in Kansas City Standard on a cassette recorder. Could be a walkman. A floppy (full 8" type) was a luxury. Almost a megabyte! imagine what you can do.. when a program is the amount of text you can fit in the VBI of a ceefax/teletext broadcast, or is typed in by hand in hex. Kansas city standard is 300 bits/second and the tape plays in real-time so a standard C60 is like 160kb on both sides if you were lucky: it misread and miswrote a LOT.
I used to do tabular GOTO jump table text adventures, and use XOR screen line drawing to do moving moire pattern interference fringes. "mod scene" trippy graphics!
Thats a mandelbrot in ASCII, the best I've seen, on the web page. Super stuff.
People wrote tiny languages for the 6502. integer only but C like syntax, or Pascal or ALGOL. People did real science in BASIC, a one weekend course got you what you needed to do some maths for a Masters or PHD in some non CS field.
My friends did a lot more of this than me. Because I had access to a Dec-10 and a PDP-11 at work and later Vax/VMS and BSD UNIX systems, I didn't see the point of home machines. A wave I wish I'd ridden but not seeing the future emerge has been a constant failure of mine.
The 6502 is the best 8bit CPU for learning stuff. There's a lot you could add to it, but there is very little could take away. It's minimal but you have everything you need.
vardump|14 days ago
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.
cosmic_cheese|14 days ago
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, which sounds lovely.
lucaspiller|14 days ago
The backstory is that in the late 2050s when AI has its hands in everything, humans loose trust of it. There are a few high profile incidents - based on AI decisions -, which cause public opinion to change, and an initiative is brought in to ensure important systems run hardware and software that can be trusted and human reviewed.
A 16bit CPU architecture - with no pipelining, speculative execution etc is chosen, as it's powerful enough to run such systems, but also simple enough that a human can fully understand the hardware and software.
The goal is to make a near-future space exploration MMO. My Macbook Pro can simulate 3000 CPU cores simultaneously, and I have a lot of fun ideas for it. The irony is that I'm using LLMs to build it :D
b112|14 days ago
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.
ksherlock|13 days ago
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.
alexisread|14 days ago
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
bluGill|14 days ago
lich_king|14 days ago
Had we stopped with 1990s tech, I don't think that things would have been fundamentally different. 1980s would have been more painful, mostly because limited memory just did not allow for particularly sophisticated graphics. So, we'd be stuck with 16-color aesthetics and you probably wouldn't be watching movies or editing photos on your computer. That would mean a blow to social media and e-commerce too.
grvbck|14 days ago
We had ELIZA, and that was enough for people to anthropomorphize their teletype terminals.
tonyedgecombe|14 days ago
As much as I like my Apple Silicon Mac I could do everything I need to on 2008 hardware.
JdeBP|14 days ago
kaashif|14 days ago
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 could've got better vacuum tubes, or maybe something else.
PetahNZ|14 days ago
dheera|14 days ago
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
Someone|13 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) is from the 1960s, so, technically, it certainly is possible. Whether it would make sense commercially to support a billion users would depend on whether we would stay stuck on prices of the eighties, too.
Also, there’s mobile usage. I would it be possible to build a mobile network with thousands of users per km² with tech from the eighties?
wolvoleo|13 days ago
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.
antidamage|14 days ago
BBSes existed at the same time and if you were into BBSes you were obsessive about it.
myself248|14 days ago
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.
yoyohello13|14 days ago
jxdxbx|13 days ago
eqvinox|14 days ago
unknown|13 days ago
[deleted]
user3939382|14 days ago
nicksergeant|14 days ago
DeathArrow|13 days ago
We would have seen much less desktop apps being written using Javascript frameworks.
anticodon|13 days ago
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.
Gibbon1|13 days ago
vidarh|14 days ago
romperstomper|14 days ago
Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)
zi2zi-jit|14 days ago
intrasight|14 days ago
deckar01|14 days ago
That said, a retro laptop this thick would look really nice in stained wood.
ezulabs|13 days ago
lawn|13 days ago
What printer are you using?
rustyhancock|14 days ago
Funnily enough I've been musing this past month would I better separate work if I had a limited Amiga A1200 PC for anything other than work! This would nicely fit.
Please do submit to HackaDay I'm sure they'd salivate over this and it's amazing when you have the creator in the comments. Even if just to explain no a 555 wouldn't quite achieve the same result. No not even a 556...
billygoat|13 days ago
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?
alnwlsn|13 days ago
jensgk|13 days ago
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
:-)
guidoism|14 days ago
Any time I see this phrase I know these are my people.
readme|14 days ago
I believe there will come a day where people who can do this will be selling these on the black market for top dollar.
ekaryotic|14 days ago
nine_k|14 days ago
shrubble|14 days ago
lysace|14 days ago
It occurred to me that given the 6502's predictable clock cycle timings it should be possible to create a realtime disassembler using e.g. an Arduino Mega 2560+character lcd display attached to the 6502's address/data/etc pins.
Of course, this would only be useful in single-stepping/very slow clock speeds. Still, I think it could be useful in learning how the 6502 works.
Is there relevant prior work? I'm struggling with my google fu.
unimplmntd_trap|10 days ago
https://github.com/dpm-343/6502-monitor
jrmg|13 days ago
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.
ted_dunning|14 days ago
Takes me back to a time when a laptop would encourage the cat to share a couch because of the amount of heat it emitted.
Amazingly quick as well. Pointless projects are so much better and more fun when they don't take forever!
marcodiego|14 days ago
What I really would love: modern (continously built) modern (less than 10 years old tech) devices ryf-cetified.
flopsamjetsam|14 days ago
speedgoose|13 days ago
drob518|14 days ago
engineer_22|14 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Lynx
louismerlin|14 days ago
https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform
wakest|14 days ago
detay|14 days ago
user3939382|14 days ago
JPLeRouzic|13 days ago
Please, what is your trick, is it a variation on bank memories?
userbinator|14 days ago
rbanffy|14 days ago
vardump|14 days ago
rickcarlino|14 days ago
aa-jv|13 days ago
zahlman|14 days ago
Not 64?
(Edit: I see part of the address space is reserved for ROM, but it still seems a bit wonky.)
wkjagt|14 days ago
lloydatkinson|13 days ago
einpoklum|14 days ago
Tor3|14 days ago
facorreia|14 days ago
Western0|13 days ago
p0w3n3d|14 days ago
analog8374|14 days ago
Narishma|14 days ago
starkeeper|14 days ago
drkrab|14 days ago
HardwareLust|14 days ago
ggm|14 days ago
Add a DIN plug and record programs in Kansas City Standard on a cassette recorder. Could be a walkman. A floppy (full 8" type) was a luxury. Almost a megabyte! imagine what you can do.. when a program is the amount of text you can fit in the VBI of a ceefax/teletext broadcast, or is typed in by hand in hex. Kansas city standard is 300 bits/second and the tape plays in real-time so a standard C60 is like 160kb on both sides if you were lucky: it misread and miswrote a LOT.
I used to do tabular GOTO jump table text adventures, and use XOR screen line drawing to do moving moire pattern interference fringes. "mod scene" trippy graphics!
Thats a mandelbrot in ASCII, the best I've seen, on the web page. Super stuff.
People wrote tiny languages for the 6502. integer only but C like syntax, or Pascal or ALGOL. People did real science in BASIC, a one weekend course got you what you needed to do some maths for a Masters or PHD in some non CS field.
My friends did a lot more of this than me. Because I had access to a Dec-10 and a PDP-11 at work and later Vax/VMS and BSD UNIX systems, I didn't see the point of home machines. A wave I wish I'd ridden but not seeing the future emerge has been a constant failure of mine.
wvenable|14 days ago
kayo_20211030|14 days ago
xx__yy|14 days ago
bananaboy|14 days ago