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And these machines were originally built at a time when everything was simpler. We’re like space aliens arriving from the future, applying our advanced tech to

And these machines were originally built at a time when everything was simpler. We’re like space aliens arriving from the future, applying our advanced tech to build an old human relic. A couple motivated people can do it. 30 years from now: “HardwareGPT, make me an Amiga but with ZX Spectrum keys”

qingcharles 2y ago
"Yes, the rubber ones!"
- vidarh 2y ago
  "I can't do that. My instructions prohibit me from doing harm."
galangalalgol 2y ago
I think there is an opportunity to use modern microcontrollers to created a similar simplified environment. The lack of a virtualizing mmu constrains ram sizes, which in turn constrains the degree of abstraction level bloat that otherwise occurs. Like living in a tiny house, everything must earn its continued place. That enables the understandability we remember. And a modern microcontroller has about the same memory as an amiga 1k while using a tiny fraction of the power for several times the processing capability. I suppose we could just use contikiOS, it has a browser of sorts even. But I think the thread model that allows premptive threads has some footguns to adopt as a general desktop system, and a browser for these systems needs a more elegant way to handle web pages that are several times its ram size than just grabbing text.
actionfromafar 2y ago
We are like space aliens from the future :) Still, it's amazing to me that we can build stuff which is vaguely comparable to our current commercial capabilities. Another similar observation... I loaded an LLM (local llama.cpp) on a 2015 laptop, almost a decade old, and had a coherent "conversation" with it. If someone had time-travelled back in 2015 and started for me that very same program on the same laptop in 2015, it would have been confusing and downright scary. I would have started looking for network connections to the remote super computer which surely must be running this thing...

qingcharles 2y ago

"Yes, the rubber ones!"

vidarh 2y ago
"I can't do that. My instructions prohibit me from doing harm."

galangalalgol 2y ago

I think there is an opportunity to use modern microcontrollers to created a similar simplified environment. The lack of a virtualizing mmu constrains ram sizes, which in turn constrains the degree of abstraction level bloat that otherwise occurs. Like living in a tiny house, everything must earn its continued place. That enables the understandability we remember. And a modern microcontroller has about the same memory as an amiga 1k while using a tiny fraction of the power for several times the processing capability. I suppose we could just use contikiOS, it has a browser of sorts even. But I think the thread model that allows premptive threads has some footguns to adopt as a general desktop system, and a browser for these systems needs a more elegant way to handle web pages that are several times its ram size than just grabbing text.

actionfromafar 2y ago

We are like space aliens from the future :) Still, it's amazing to me that we can build stuff which is vaguely comparable to our current commercial capabilities. Another similar observation... I loaded an LLM (local llama.cpp) on a 2015 laptop, almost a decade old, and had a coherent "conversation" with it. If someone had time-travelled back in 2015 and started for me that very same program on the same laptop in 2015, it would have been confusing and downright scary. I would have started looking for network connections to the remote super computer which surely must be running this thing...