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.

• cosmic_cheese

  today at 7:27 PM

  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.

  • antidamage

    today at 10:19 PM

    I loved System 7 for its simplicity yet all of the potential it had for individual developers.

    Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.

  • rahkiin

    today at 8:22 PM

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

    • rbanffy

      today at 9:51 PM

      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.

    • b112

      today at 9:50 PM

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

      • rbanffy

        today at 9:56 PM

        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.

  • kittbuilds

    today at 10:14 PM

    [dead]

• antidamage

  today at 10:17 PM

  Teletext existed in the 80s and was widely in use, so we'd have some kind of information network.

  BBSes existed at the same time and if you were into BBSes you were obsessive about it.

• b112

  today at 9:49 PM

  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.

  • kevin_thibedeau

    today at 10:08 PM

    > graphics that were wanting

    Prodigy established a (limited) graphical online service in 1988.

• bluGill

  today at 6:40 PM

  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.

  • Aurornis

    today at 8:27 PM

    > 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.

    • nebula8804

      today at 9:10 PM

      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

    • Tor3

      today at 9:40 PM

      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.

    • ok_dad

      today at 8:52 PM

      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.

    • raverbashing

      today at 9:00 PM

      Yeah slow?

      Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow

    • exe34

      today at 8:46 PM

      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.

  • t-3

    today at 9:40 PM

    I remember using the web in the 90s. I often left to make a sandwich while pages loaded.

  • peterfirefly

    today at 6:58 PM

    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.

    • graemep

      today at 8:10 PM

      I cannot recall crashes being a problem.

    • szundi

      today at 8:08 PM

      [dead]

  • rbanffy

    today at 9:42 PM

    Try opening Gmail on one of those. Won’t be fun.

• alexisread

  today at 7:52 PM

  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

• tonyedgecombe

  today at 8:39 PM

  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.

  • keyringlight

    today at 10:02 PM

    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.

• kaashif

  today at 6:30 PM

  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.

  • jhbadger

    today at 6:46 PM

    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.

    • rbanffy

      today at 10:03 PM

      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.

  • vardump

    today at 6:40 PM

    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.

    • jecel

      today at 10:01 PM

      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)

      • rbanffy

        today at 10:05 PM

        > 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.

• yoyohello13

  today at 8:56 PM

  This is basically the premise of the Fallout universe. I think in the story it was the transistor was never invented though.

• JdeBP

  today at 5:54 PM

  Transputers. Lots and lots and lots of transputers. (-:

  • dpe82

    today at 7:25 PM

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

    • rbanffy

      today at 10:08 PM

      Lots and lots of red LEDs. Such an iconic machine! I miss computers that look good.

      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.

• PetahNZ

  today at 6:40 PM

  We did have web browsers, I had Internet Explorer on Windows 3.1, 33mhz 8mb RAM.

  • phwbikm

    today at 7:13 PM

    I still remember the Mosaic from NCSA. Internet in a box.

  • drzaiusx11

    today at 7:13 PM

    Probably was "Windows 3.11, For Workgroups" as iirc Windows 3.1 didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack

    • dpe82

      today at 7:22 PM

      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.

      • rbanffy

        today at 10:07 PM

        3.11 was so much nicer than 3.1 (and 3.0) I can’t imagine not moving to it as soon as possible.

      • tosapple

        today at 9:15 PM

        [dead]

• vidarh

  today at 7:38 PM

  There are web browsers for 8-bits today, and there were web browsers for e.g. Amiga's with 68000 CPU's from 1979 back in the day.

• myself248

  today at 5:52 PM

  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.

  • iberator

    today at 6:31 PM

    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.

    • rbanffy

      today at 10:10 PM

      > 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.

    • vidarh

      today at 7:33 PM

      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).

    • cluckindan

      today at 6:38 PM

      Not JavaScript. Facebook.

      • j16sdiz

        today at 6:42 PM

        Netscape 2 support javascript on 16-bit Windows 3.1

  • petra

    today at 9:52 PM

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

  • phwbikm

    today at 7:15 PM

    I have a Hayes 9600kbps modem for web surfing.

    • rbanffy

      today at 10:11 PM

      “Web surfing” sounds so much healthier than “doom scrolling”…

  • rm30

    today at 7:30 PM

    I remember when I went from 286 to 486dx2, the difference was impressive, able to run a lot of graphical applications smoothly.

    Ironically, now I'm using an ESP32-S3, 10x more powerful, just to run Iot devices.

  • drob518

    today at 7:50 PM

    Depends how pervasive OC3 would have gotten. A 1080p video stream is only about 7 Mbps today.

    • fhars

      today at 9:47 PM

      You only have to bundle about 110 ISDN channels to transfer that (four E1 or five T1 trunk lines).

• romperstomper

  today at 8:10 PM

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

  Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)

• zi2zi-jit

  today at 9:37 PM

  tbh we'd probably just have really good Forth programmers instead of LLMs. same vibe, fewer parameters.

• user3939382

  today at 9:12 PM

  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.

• intrasight

  today at 6:26 PM

  Well, we wouldn't have ads and tracking.

  • vidarh

    today at 7:41 PM

    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.

  • peterfirefly

    today at 7:01 PM

    If such an alternate reality has internet of any speed above "turtle in a mobility scooter" then there for sure would be ads and tracking.

  • p_ing

    today at 7:35 PM

    The young WWW had garish flashing banner ads.

    • kevin_thibedeau

      today at 10:12 PM

      The young web had no ads at all.

• dheera

  today at 7:55 PM

  > 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

  • Aurornis

    today at 8:32 PM

    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.

    • dxdm

      today at 8:58 PM

      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.

This would have been absolutely mind blowing back in the day!

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...

> Yes, I know I'm crazy, but

Any time I see this phrase I know these are my people.

• readme

  today at 8:07 PM

  Crazy for wanting a computer that's actually yours.

  I believe there will come a day where people who can do this will be selling these on the black market for top dollar.

neat. not something i´d hanker for. i saw a 16 core z80 laptop years ago and i often think about it because it can multitask. https://hackaday.com/2019/12/10/laptop-like-its-1979-with-a-...

• nine_k

  today at 6:56 PM

  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 the super clunky retro esthetic!

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!

Brilliant! I love it. Bonus points for using the eWoz monitor. It’s giving me the itch to build it.

Maybe this can achieve RYF certification.

What I really would love: modern (continously built) modern (less than 10 years old tech) devices ryf-cetified.

6502 based computers shouldn’t have a “dir” command. It’s “catalog” for detailed info or “cat” for the short one.

Awesome! Gives me mnt pocket reform vibes.

https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform

• wakest

  today at 9:37 PM

  lol hi merlin, was peeking in the comments wondering if anyone would say this

> 46K RAM

Not 64?

(Edit: I see part of the address space is reserved for ROM, but it still seems a bit wonky.)

Wow. It's fresh as a rose! Congratulations!

this post made me smile. why not!!! 6502 my first processor. <3

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.

Way cool! When can I buy one?

Complete madness! But, I love it.

And it mostly runs Microsoft software, too... Basic from 1977 :-P

• Tor3

  today at 9:35 PM

  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.

  • jdswain

    today at 10:21 PM

    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.

It's commodore 64 ish. I like it