6 ms·
Wow. And I thought modern NetBSD on a 15 MHz m68030 with a 16 bit memory bus and 10 megabytes of RAM is slow. This is crazy! It illustrates a point I've explai
by johnklos 2y ago
Wow. And I thought modern NetBSD on a 15 MHz m68030 with a 16 bit memory bus and 10 megabytes of RAM is slow. This is crazy!
It illustrates a point I've explained to many people over the years: once computers started coming with persistent storage, open address spaces and MMUs towards the late '80s and early '90s, we basically arrived at modern computing. An Amiga 3000 or i80486 computer can run the same things as a modern computer. Sure, we have ways to run things orders of magnitude faster, and sure, we now have things that didn't exist then (like GPUs that can run code), but there's no functional difference between those machines and new ones.
I love that Dmitry shows how loosely "functional" can be defined :)
- dmitrygr 2y agoI don’t know if this was a thing in America, but in USSR in the 70s and 80s it was very popular to play chess-by-correspondence. You would literally snail-mail letters back-and-forth with your move. Games would last months or years. It added an extra challenge to chess because by the time you got a response, you might have forgotten what strategy you had had. This project is basically Linux-by-correspondence. The challenge is here too. By the time the command produces an output, you might have forgotten why you ran it.
- noufalibrahim 2y agoThere was something called Agora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser)) which was sort of an email/http proxy. You could browse the web via. email and set "GET", "POST" etc. commands. It was my first exposure to the web. It sounds very similar to what you mentioned.
- asdefghyk 2y agoThere was also a system where a person could email a request for a webpage to a certain email address and the web page would be returned by email. Existed in late 1980s? I think or maybe early 1990s?
- noufalibrahim 2y agoThat's what Agora did. I used it for a while using pine. I still remember the address by heart. It was agora@dna.affrc.go.jp. I guess you never forget your first time : - )
- password4321 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387879#30390269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30387879#30390269 > Richard Stallman browses the web via email. https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
- johnklos 2y agoI installed Windows 95 on an Amiga 3000 with a 25 MHz m68030 via floppy to see if DMF formatted disks would work and to play around. By the time it finished, I had forgotten what I wanted to try out.
- unit149 2y agoReorganizing the combined correspondence on an excel spreadsheet through an arbitrary numbering system years later, and experiencing the Spinozan "pang of bad conscience." Did you write the PIC12F1840 HEX file in 4004 machine code for your PIC-based one-chip sound player?
- jylam 2y agoThat's basically the concept of Turing Completeness. Any Turing complete system can run anything. It may be very slow, but it will run. ChatGPT could run on a 4004, all you need is time.
- qwerty456127 2y agohttps://cs.stackexchange.com/a/60978 https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/60978
- byteknight 2y agoAnd a gargantuan amount of RAM.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoA computer is technically not a Turing machine due to the lack of infinite RAM. It is a finite state machine with an absurdly large state space.
- brudgers 2y agoBecause it has infinite RAM, technically the Turing machine is not a machine.
- kazinator 2y agoWhat? A Turing machine can literally be built. The only problem is supplying the infinite tape, or splicing on more when it runs to the end of a finite tape. Machines that address storage using fixed width pointers (and have no other kind of storage) cannot be Turing machines.
- brudgers 2y agoThe only problem is supplying the infinite tape In so far as infinite tape is feasibile, you are correct.
- 2y ago
- retrac 2y ago15 MHz m68030 with a 16 bit memory bus and 10 megabytes of RAM -- A Mac LC II, by any chance? :) > towards the late '80s and early '90s By the late 1960s, really. It would probably be possible to port Linux to the IBM Model 67 [1]; might even be easy since GCC can already target the instruction set. The MMU is sufficient. Maybe a tight squeeze with the max of 2 MB of fast core. Would be in a similar ballpark, a bit slower, to that 68030 machine. Full virtualization, and hardware enforced memory and IO boundaries, were invented early on, too. It took a while for such features to trickle down to mini- and then micro- computers. And then much longer for popular software to take advantage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_67 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_67
- vincent-manis 2y agoI have fond memories of the System/360 M67 (and its successors, starting with a System/370 M168) I used from 1970 to the early 1980s. It ran the Michigan Terminal System, and we had all the modern conveniences (terminal operation in the IBM world was klunky, but PDP-10s at the same time did that right). And of course Unix dates from exactly that period. The fact that Linux runs well on a modern zSeries demonstrates that, even with all the historical baggage this 60+-year-old architecture has, it carries with it many of the architectural innovations that current OSes and languages need.
- jdougan 2y agoOh man, I has so much fun on MTS once that ridiculous fake PC-ish command line was removed. Wrote all kinds of wacky stuff using the command line macros.
- johnklos 2y agoWonderful look in to our history, and you're undoubtedly correct about being able to target that system. My example was about hardware that was affordable to mere mortals (although it's getting to be more expensive to buy that same hardware now as it was to buy it when it was new), but the idea is the same :)
- johnklos 2y ago
- jart 2y agoMulticore is a pretty big functional difference. Like attaching an automobile to a wheel lets you have three more wheels.