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Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser
- jitl 5y agoEmscripten is very cool. So is this optimization effort. This feels like the truest form of the promise of open source.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoIt feels so fast. Even in the browser. Modern OSes just feels so sluggish by comparison.
- andai 5y agoWhen I want to get work done quickly, I boot up Windows XP in a VM. It's just so damn snappy it's unbelievable. What Moore giveth, Gates taketh away...
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoI swear. What happened here? Like why do things feel sluggish than software over 20 years ago? I just can't wrap my mind around it. We have SSDs and infinite CPU and RAM now compared to those days, yet there is always this feeling the computer is doing something more than I asked for behind the scenes. Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It's a very uncomfortable feeling.
- buildbot 5y agoIt really is bad. Somehow I brought an 8 core desktop to its knees because a combination of heavy disk+network IO and using pycharm caused windows to just stop servicing pycharm at all, until I stopped the download. I had free memory, disk, and cpu time, I think interrupt processing was stalled or filled? But the hardware was idle.
- naikrovek 5y ago> What happened here? three things, I think: 1) people saying (and believing) that CPU, RAM, and disk are fast enough and cheap enough to be effectively infinite, and no longer worthy of concern. put another way: developers feeling that their target platforms are no longer constrained. 2) many software developers simply stopped caring about performance and began implementing all kinds of things extremely naively. new developers do this continually for many years early in their careers. 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. and JavaScript is EVERYWHERE, even on extremely constrained platforms, doing work, when almost any other language would have been a better choice.
- qudat 4y ago> 3) JavaScript. the places this language is used today, where it should never, ever be used. excruciatingly slow language. [citation needed] Slow, fast are relative terms. What are you comparing it against?
- methyl 5y agoJavascript is one of the fastest dynamically typed languages. People use it instead of other languages because the productivity of dynamically typed languages is generally higher. I’d be interested in hearing what are those other languages that would be faster to run and not slower to program in.
- eloisius 5y ago"Not slower to program in" is a cost savings to the business, but let's be honest about that being what it is. It's a cost savings for the business that results in a crummier product for customers. Just like trimming a single tomato from the salad on in-flight meals is a cost savings to Delta. Doesn't mean it's a "better" salad.
- methyl 5y agoIt's a question of having it or not at all. Poor salad is better than no salad.
- jedberg 5y agoYou just don't remember 20 years ago. The modern OSs at the time were sluggish too, as they were pushing the limits of their hardware. Your computer today would be pretty quick if it only did what your computer of 20 years ago did and in only 1024x768. OSs today do a lot more than 20 years ago at about the same speed as 20 years ago. Now, we can debate if all the extras are necessary, but that seems like a different debate than speed.
- eloisius 5y agoI think that’s what GP was saying. It feels like everything is doing way more behind the scenes, and it feels sluggish. I almost can’t type anything long in Slack because the key input latency is so awful. What is it doing? Firing off a cascade of JS event hooks that pre-query reaction gifs, fetching away status for every user I might have mentioned, or what? Slack is obviously a pathological example, but it illustrates what’s feeling more and more common in modern GUI applications.
- markdog12 4y agohttps://twitter.com/programmer_just/status/1253098759266893827 https://twitter.com/programmer_just/status/12530987592668938...
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago>What is it doing? Firing off a cascade of JS event hooks that pre-query reaction gifs, fetching away status for every user I might have mentioned, or what? Probably not sluggish for any of that, just that some incompetent dev didn’t want to deal with the built in input control or the inconsistency between OSes so they rolled their own and coded it badly. Number of times I’ve had to deal with devs doing things like deciding we must create a custom color picker only for them to code it and it glitches if you drag your mouse off the edge of the color wheel. Or coding their own text controls that break OS spellcheck or autocomplete and have input delay for some reason. Just isn’t that much talent about up to the task of building inputs yet all the low talents rush to roll their own for the smallest reasons.
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- tentacleuno 5y ago> Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more. It's a very uncomfortable feeling. I know what you mean! Some websites make link clicks take a little longer. I'm not sure if it's due to tracking...
- flomo 5y ago> Even on websites, you can feel when you click on a link, it is doing something more It is, analytics hooks which require network round trips. Otherwise disagree and this is false memories and/or very superficial observation of "snappiness".
- edwcross 5y agoWe transitioned from a "high-trust society" (where software, Internet, etc, did not need to take into account so many security considerations, protect itself from enemies everywhere) into a "low-trust society" (encryption everywhere, hardware mitigations for Spectre-kind attacks, Javascript-based tracking, etc). The overhead is similar to the one people face in third-world countries: you pay once for the government (taxes), then again for basic services (private education, private security, private health, private transportation), and you still end up in a worse situation than in a (high-trust) first-world country. I tried using a Core 2 Duo laptop recently, but the simple fact that HTTPS is mandatory nowadays, and Core 2 doesn't have AES-NI, makes the laptop spin its fan much more than it should, even if I try to use an old Linux/Windows.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- skocznymroczny 5y agoMost apps connect to the internet for 'updates' 'content synchronization'. Every time you open a new tab in your app there's some spinning wheel you have to wait for.
- slig 5y agoWhat kind of work can you do on a WinXP VM? I can imagine working on Word or Excel on that OS.
- rado 5y agoTeams on an insanely fast M1 Max is slower than this.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y agoI know!!! I am on an M1 pro myself and a lot of modern apps feel more sluggish than this.
- lynguist 5y agoYou can use Teams as a Microsoft Edge web app. It runs natively and is very fast.
- rado 5y agoKind of. I have audio/video permissions issues in the browser. Trying to use the app as much as possible on iPad Pro, it's fine there.
- nyanpasu64 5y agoIt's striking how quickly all the apps load and respond to user input. Nonetheless this in-browser version suffers from layers of abstraction; the mouse cursor feels noticeably sluggish (high latency), and audio is delayed by over half a second, desynchronizing entirely from video.
- blihp 5y agoI had (still have, actually) a Quadra 840AV which was the fastest 68k Mac they ever made and it never felt this fast. If they emulated the actual performance of a 68k (and associated hardware) you wouldn't long for the performance it offered. But sure, running a much simpler (and more efficient out of necessity) OS on modern hardware, even emulated, screams on today's hardware. On the other hand, it didn't pack anywhere near the amount of functionality so the majority of the ROM and OS will fit in the L3 cache of today's processors so of course it's fast.
- anthk 5y agoThe faster 68k ever was an Amiga with ShapeShifter ;).
- thanatos519 5y agoIt's all about latency. Both of the following made my computers feel super snappy again! Liquorix kernel: https://liquorix.net/ https://liquorix.net/ ... Just a well-tuned kernel build, really. Kitty terminal: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/ ... It took a while to make Kitty play nice with GNU Screen because the author has a hate-on for terminal multiplexers, but it was totally worth it.
- 3np 5y ago> It took a while to make Kitty play nice with GNU Screen because the author has a hate-on for terminal multiplexers, but it was totally worth it. Do you have a link or some pointers to share?
- jasonjayr 5y agoI'm curious about that too, kitty + tmux has been a solid replacement for my long use of urxvt + it's tabs plugin, and it was no trouble at all to get setup
- smackeyacky 5y agoMy daily driver ancient HP deskside server I use as a workstation is bonkers snappy running liquorix under debian.
- watersb 5y agoCurious! What model and configuration are you using?
- smackeyacky 5y agoIts an ML330 G6, dual x5650 6 core Xeons and 96gb of memory. Old ATI radeon 6570 graphics card. Very cheap to put together, great for android studio and .NET development.
- anthk 5y agoTry Xanmod instead of Liquorix. Also, if your hardware it's fully supported under Linux-Libre, apply the Xanmod patches for that kernel. You'll get crazy speeds.
- pram 5y agoSeems like something isn't right, Warcraft 2 is running extremely slow (M1 Max + Safari)
- FpUser 5y agoWell, first of all it "is running inside modern OS " and being snappy while the OS does all kinds of other things. What is often slow are desktop applications build with total disregard for performance. Everything must be done using web stack common attitude does not help much either.
- bitwize 5y agoTry an Amiga with plenty of disk space and RAM. It took the PC world 10 or more years to catch up with the Amiga in responsiveness. Part of the reason was the Amiga OS was designed for user interaction, and the keyboard, mouse, and display got plum choice of IRQs. The next time I would see something as snappy as the Amiga was an M1 Mac.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoPC never really felt as solid as an Amiga. It just feels like a single coherent system and PC feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks and the seams show when it moves.
- the_only_law 5y ago> PC feels like hacks upon hacks upon hacks and the seams show when it moves. And to this day, it just keeps getting worse.
- whywhywhywhy 5y agoBlown away that if windows ever fails to boot I have to unplug from my gpu then plug into my motherboard and reboot to see what’s up with it.
- alimov 5y agoI agree with you, and I think that part of the issue are the animations that run when doing practically anything on a newer OS, like maximizing or minimizing a window. Edit: in some cases animations can be disabled, which does a bit to bring back the snappy feel, but there are probably additional reasons why the modern stuff might not be/feel as snappy.
- shp0ngle 5y agoHah. Mac OS 9 could run iMovie (the first version, anyway). Maybe I should try that in the browser. edit: ah even playing simple QuickTime movies do not work, I don't think editing will. Oh well.
- brian_herman 5y agoIt came true: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death... This presenter presented a presentation on javascript at pycon which this was predicted.
- upwardbound 5y agoBtw if you want to try the games, they seem to work in system7.app but not in macos8.app
- syrusakbary 5y agoI love seeing more and more apps targeting the browser with WebAssembly (in this case via Emscripten)
- rcarmo 5y agoI want this, but with a working browser and terminal, as my only desktop environment.
- jzer0cool 5y agoI use to know so many easter eggs on these 7x versions :) Any cool projects to bring an old quadra (68xxx) to life, or how about a Power PC?
- russellbeattie 5y agoJust used it on my Samsung tablet and it absolutely flies and supports touch. Such great work!
- lioeters 5y agoRecently I fell into a wormhole, or rather time sink, playing with a Gameboy emulator that runs in the browser. https://github.com/binji/binjgb https://github.com/binji/binjgb There's something so satisfying about a virtual machine that fits in a ~106K WASM file, that can play hundreds of classic games like Teris and Super Mario Bros (via ROM collections on Internet Archive). I don't usually play games, but this emulator is so cute and fun, I keep coming back to waste time on it. Actually, PICO-8 was the last time I felt this kind of child-like joy about a computer. I get a similar feeling from this Infinite Mac project. https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac It's so pleasing to see a running Macintosh in the browser. That interface feels like an old friend. The underlying VM, BasiliskII, is a little less than 1MB WASM file. Amazing! From the entertaining article, I learned about "retrocomputing". Now I know, that's what I'm into, haha. I especially like it when it's virtualized - like a microcosmos.
- peterkelly 5y agoIf you thought that was a time sink, just search for "retrocomputing" on youtube. We'll see you back here once you resurface in a year or so :) Its a huge hobby with enormous amounts of cool projects. The one that most impresses me is https://misterfpga.org/ https://misterfpga.org/ where the community has built FPGA implementations of almost all common game consoles and home computers from the 80s and early 90s.
- nonamenoslogan 5y agoThanks for the link--this is amazing. I'm still clinging to hope someone releases a single-board computer of classic Mac architecture. I love my old Macs, but I know eventually they will pass-on and having a 68xxx based SBC that could run System 7 would be awesome.
- anthk 5y agoWait until you see IOCCC entries on emulation. 8086 emulator under 43 KB. PDP11 in a few lines, too, running the OLD IOCCC entries from the 80's inside that emulator. Crazy stuff.
- whalesalad 5y agoMy first computer as a kid was a Quadra 610. This is very cool!
- mkoryak 5y agothis is really cool, I was going to play some warcraft, but alas, the framerate is worse than my 66mhz DX2. Anyone know where I can get my hands on some warcraft that actually works?
- fils 5y agosystem error: -127 WOW.. it's exactly as I remember it :) Joke aside, that was a FUN walk down memory lane for me.
- fils 5y agoWait.. Dark Castle actually runs?! I can't get the controls to work, can anyone help.. I desperately want to show this to my son so he can see what I used to play. :)
- zackmorris 5y agoNot sure for PC or Linux, but the keyboard works in the newest Chrome on my older Intel Mac Mini. I just had to go to Apple -> Control Panels -> Monitors -> scroll up -> Black & White before launching. For new players, the keys are under the Options button at lower-right: AWDS (move), Q (action), E (duck), Space (jump), using the mouse to aim the arm up and down and clicking to shoot. The Info button explains: keys 1-4 to choose the door in the beginning, Tab (pause) and Command-Q (quit, but quits the browser..), some keys can be held down.. good luck!
- caslon 5y agoTry using the native build of Basilisk II? You might have a bit better luck.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoDoes the network for for anyone? I wanted to test out my website in Netscape, but it wouldn't connect...
- JKCalhoun 5y agoVery cool. Guess I'll have to learn WebAssembly if I want to write something fast like this.
- skybrian 5y agoLemmings works, except that there are some glitches in the music.