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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is probably me experiencing a simulacra but with that slow loading getting up to go get a drink workflow, each page load was more special. It was magical discovering new websites just like trying out new software by picking something up from those "pegboards" at computer stores.
It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life.
A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
Browsing the web was slow, because the network was slow. It wasn't really because the desktop computers were slow. I remember our company having just a 64 kbit/s connection to the 'net, even as late as in 1997.. well, that was pretty good compared to the place where I was contracted to at the time, in Italy.. they had 19.2 kbit/s. Really big sites could have something much better, and browsing the internet at their sites was a different experience then, using the same computers.
No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.
what a glorious time that was! now it's too easy to get stuck looking at the stream of (usually AI generated) crap. I long for the time when the regular screen break was built-in.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
There was a sockets API though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock) and IIRC we all used Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.1 with our dialup connections. But could have been 3.11 - my memory is a bit hazy.
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.
you are wrong. Windows 3.11 era used CPUs with like 33mhz cpu, and yet we had TONS of graphical applications. Including web browsers, Photoshop, CAD, Excel and instant messangers
Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.
> Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.
JavaScript is innocent. The people writing humongous apps with it are the ones to blame. And memory footprint. A 16 MB machine wouldn’t be able to hold the icons an average web app uses today.
I don't see how this contradicts any of what they said, unless they've edited their comment.
You're right we had graphical apps, but we did also have very little video. CuSeeMe existed - video conferencing would've still been a thing, but with limited resolution due to bandwidth constraints. Video in general was an awful low res mess and would have remained so if most people were limited to ISDN speeds.
While there were still images on the web, the amount of graphical flourishes were still heavily bandwidth limited.
The bandwidth limit they proposed would be a big deal even if CPU speeds continued to increase (it could only mitigate so much with better compression).
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.
Prodigy launched online ads from the 1980s. AOL as well.
HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994.
DoubleClick was founded in 1995.
Neither were limited to 90's hardware:
Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.
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
The whitewashing of the past in this thread is something else.
Did everyone forget the era of web browsing when pages were filled with distracting animated banner ads?
The period when it was common for malicious ads to just hijack the session and take you to a different page?
The pop-up tornados where a page would spawn pop ups faster than you could close them? Pop unders getting left behind to discover when you closed your window?
Heavy flash ads causing your browser to slow to a crawl?
The modern web browsing experience without an ad blocker feels tame compared to the early days of Internet ads.
What you describe sounds like the late nineties to me, not what we had with the technology of (at most) 1990. There are orders of magnitude between available performance and memory on both ends of this decade.
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 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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
There has been some discussion around this, and Lee Davison is no longer with us so that makes it more difficult. It appears from the source code that Lee's independent basic is highly based on Microsoft Basic. I'm sure it is no longer an issue, especially as Microsoft has provided a free license for Microsoft 6502 basic, but the licensing situation is not entirely clear.
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.
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.
Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.
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.
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.
BBSes existed at the same time and if you were into BBSes you were obsessive about it.
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.
Prodigy established a (limited) graphical online service in 1988.
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.
It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life.
A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow
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
As much as I like my Apple Silicon Mac I could do everything I need to on 2008 hardware.
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.
People that time were not actually sure how long the improvements would go on.
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)
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.
BTW, IBM has been doing a fine design job with their quantum computers - they aren’t quite the revolution we were promised, but they do look the part.
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.
Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.
JavaScript is innocent. The people writing humongous apps with it are the ones to blame. And memory footprint. A 16 MB machine wouldn’t be able to hold the icons an average web app uses today.
You're right we had graphical apps, but we did also have very little video. CuSeeMe existed - video conferencing would've still been a thing, but with limited resolution due to bandwidth constraints. Video in general was an awful low res mess and would have remained so if most people were limited to ISDN speeds.
While there were still images on the web, the amount of graphical flourishes were still heavily bandwidth limited.
The bandwidth limit they proposed would be a big deal even if CPU speeds continued to increase (it could only mitigate so much with better compression).
Ironically, now I'm using an ESP32-S3, 10x more powerful, just to run Iot devices.
Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)
HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994.
DoubleClick was founded in 1995.
Neither were limited to 90's hardware:
Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.
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
Did everyone forget the era of web browsing when pages were filled with distracting animated banner ads?
The period when it was common for malicious ads to just hijack the session and take you to a different page?
The pop-up tornados where a page would spawn pop ups faster than you could close them? Pop unders getting left behind to discover when you closed your window?
Heavy flash ads causing your browser to slow to a crawl?
The modern web browsing experience without an ad blocker feels tame compared to the early days of Internet ads.
That said, a retro laptop this thick would look really nice in stained wood.
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...
Any time I see this phrase I know these are my people.
I believe there will come a day where people who can do this will be selling these on the black market for top dollar.
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!
What I really would love: modern (continously built) modern (less than 10 years old tech) devices ryf-cetified.
https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform
Not 64?
(Edit: I see part of the address space is reserved for ROM, but it still seems a bit wonky.)
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.