18 ms·

LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop

• vardump 8mo ago
  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.
  • grvbck 8mo ago
    > One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible. We had ELIZA, and that was enough for people to anthropomorphize their teletype terminals.
  • myself248 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      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.
      • cluckindan 8mo ago
        Not JavaScript. Facebook.
        • j16sdiz 8mo ago
          Netscape 2 support javascript on 16-bit Windows 3.1
      • vidarh 8mo ago
        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).
        • iberator 8mo ago
          i remember watching adult videos on windows 3.11 with 486dx 100mhz. CD-ROM VIDEO thing. I guess it was just just mpeg2 format
      • rbanffy 8mo ago
        > 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.
        • bitwize 8mo ago
          Netscape was talking about making the Web an app platform to replace Microsoft Windows even way back then. The world we're living in today is exactly what they envisioned.
          • rbanffy 8mo ago
            Electron wouldn’t be possible back then.
            • bitwize 8mo ago
              Electron was effectively invented by Microsoft in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application Which is funny, because HTML, Java, and JavaScript were being talked about as an app platform a few years before then, precisely to prevent Microsoft from drinking everybody's milkshake on the desktop.
    • phwbikm 8mo ago
      I have a Hayes 9600kbps modem for web surfing.
      • rbanffy 8mo ago
        “Web surfing” sounds so much healthier than “doom scrolling”…
    • rm30 8mo ago
      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 8mo ago
      Depends how pervasive OC3 would have gotten. A 1080p video stream is only about 7 Mbps today.
      • fhars 8mo ago
        You only have to bundle about 110 ISDN channels to transfer that (four E1 or five T1 trunk lines).
        • myself248 8mo ago
          Right, but point is, assume the "backbone" never got fast enough to have a million subscribers all doing that at once. I remember a subscriber T1 costing 4 figures per month, and I don't think it's because the copper pairs themselves were any different. (They weren't. As long as they didn't have bridge-taps, it was just plain old pairs. The repeaters every few kilofeet were not that expensive either.) I remember the early-90s internet guidance that idle traffic like keepalive pings was discouraged, especially if you were sending traffic overseas, because it cluttered up the backbone links with packets that weren't actually valuable, and that was rude / abusive. Presumably edge CDNs would've still happened (or, ISPs providing Usenet servers basically did a lot of that already), but you simply wouldn't be doing video over the internet at large because the bandwidth charges would kill you.
          • drob518 8mo ago
            You would still have video happening, but it would not be the type we have today (streaming arbitrary full-length movies from a nearly infinite catalog and YouTube). It would be used for big events and things like that. We might still have gotten podcasting, though.
            • myself248 8mo ago
              Podcasting distributed by NNTP would be so much more efficient than RSS and HTTP, too!
        • drob518 8mo ago
    • petra 8mo ago
      It's probably possible to develop analog adsl chips in 1990 semi tech. But pretty difficult.
  • JdeBP 8mo ago
    Transputers. Lots and lots and lots of transputers. (-:
    • dpe82 8mo ago
      And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
      • rbanffy 8mo ago
        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.
  • intrasight 8mo ago
    Well, we wouldn't have ads and tracking.
    • peterfirefly 8mo ago
      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 8mo ago
      The young WWW had garish flashing banner ads.
      • kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
        The young web had no ads at all.
        • p_ing 8mo ago
          You're misremembering the young web.
          • kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
            Did you see any ads in 1993?
            • vardump 8mo ago
              Hmm... Most pages that time were grey with very few images. Ads were certainly very rare in 1993.
        • vidarh 8mo ago
          For a very narrow definition of "the young web". The period without ads lasted ~4 years, during which almost nobody used the web, and even fewer used a graphical browser. Mosaic 0.5 was first released in January '93 (yes, there were other graphical browsers preceding it, like Viola, but none saw broad distribution) Netscape was first launched in October '94. By '94 the first banner ads existed. DoubleClick started selling banner ads in '95.
  • kaashif 8mo ago
    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.
    • vardump 8mo ago
      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 8mo ago
        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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_(microprocessor)
        • rbanffy 8mo ago
          > 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.
  • PetahNZ 8mo ago
    We did have web browsers, I had Internet Explorer on Windows 3.1, 33mhz 8mb RAM.
    • drzaiusx11 8mo ago
      Probably was "Windows 3.11, For Workgroups" as iirc Windows 3.1 didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack
      • dpe82 8mo ago
        There was a sockets API though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock 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.
        • tosapple 8mo ago
          [dead]
        • rbanffy 8mo ago
          3.11 was so much nicer than 3.1 (and 3.0) I can’t imagine not moving to it as soon as possible.
          • dpe82 8mo ago
            I was like 11 at the time buying computer stuff with lawn care earnings so I used whatever I could get my hands on. :)
          • aleph_minus_one 8mo ago
            Windows for Workgroups 3.11 did not contain Cardfile. :-(
            • rbanffy 8mo ago
              Didn’t it have a proper address book? I remember I could send faxes through Mail.
  • bluGill 8mo ago
    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.
    • peterfirefly 8mo ago
      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.
      • szundi 8mo ago
        [dead]
      • graemep 8mo ago
        I cannot recall crashes being a problem.
        • II2II 8mo ago
          I remember Netscape Navigator crashing, taking Solaris down with it. I could only imagine what it was like on Windows 9x. I don't want to imagine what Windows 3.x users endured. Windows 3.x was the OS where people saved early and saved often, since the lack of proper memory protection meant that a bad application (or worse, a bad driver) could BSOD the system at any time.
          • ksherlock 8mo ago
            I once did an April Fool's spoof of netscape that displayed a wait cursor for 2 minutes then a bomb alert. For classic Mac, it was 90% accurate with only 1% the disk footprint.
        • tom_ 8mo ago
          With Windows 9x, I recall the crashes being manageable, but it was advisable to give the system 15 minutes to settle down after rebooting. Windows would start multiple things at once on startup and it was a bit risky to overstress it. Windows NT 4 seemed OK, but a lot of software didn't run. By the time of Windows 2000 the tradeoff was much better. (Allowing a settle down time remained a good idea, in my experience. Even if Windows 2000 and later were very unlikely to actually crash, the response time would still be dogshit until everything had been given time to settle into a steady state. This problem didn't get properly fixed until pervasive use of SSDs - some time between Windows 7 and Windows 8, maybe? - and even then the fix was just that there was no longer any pressing need to actually fix it.)
  • cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
    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.
    • rahkiin 8mo ago
      Given enough power and space efficiency you would start putting multiple cpus together for specialized tasks. Distributed computing could have looked differently
      • rbanffy 8mo ago
        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.
        • LeFantome 8mo ago
          Half my Linux machines are Macs “retired” for exactly this reason.
      • b112 8mo ago
        This was the Amiga. Custom coprpcessors for sound, video, etc.
        • rbanffy 8mo ago
  • vidarh 8mo ago
    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.
  • alexisread 8mo ago
    Apart from transputers mentioned already, there’s https://greenarrays.com/home/documents/g144apps.php 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS Show that we could have had quality desktops and mobile devices
    • PostOnce 8mo ago
      I want to chime in on SymbOS, which I think is the perfect reply to the GP's curiosity. https://www.symbos.org/shots.htm https://www.symbos.org/shots.htm This is what slow computers with a few hundred kB of RAM can do.
      • nxobject 8mo ago
        The original Macintosh had similar specs as well – 128k with a 68k clocked at ~6-7 MHz. It helps that both platforms put a significant amount of OS code in ROM.
  • dheera 8mo ago
    > 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 8mo ago
      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 8mo ago
        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.
      • dheera 8mo ago
        Most of what you describe were the late 1990s/early 2000s, not the days of NCSA Mosaic. Also > distracting animated banner ads These were characteristic of the late 90s, but were way easier to block back then. Just put "0.0.0.0 ad.doubleclick.net" in your /etc/hosts and 99% of them went away. Or send them to 127.0.0.1 and serve a white single pixel GIF with Apache to avoid web browsers hanging on the request. The popups of the late 90s were easy to get rid of too, all you had to do was disable JS. There were almost zero websites that did anything good with JS back then. Flash crap? Don't install it if you don't want it.
  • romperstomper 8mo ago
    > One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible. Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)
    • nxobject 8mo ago
      Honestly, I think we could’ve pulled off a lot earlier if GPU development had invested in GPGPU earlier. I can see it now… the a national lab can run ImageNet, but it takes so many nodes with unobtanium 3dfx stuff that you have to wait 24 hours for a run to be scheduled and completed.
  • tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      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.
    • vardump 8mo ago
      It's remarkable how a modern $50 SBC outperforms the old Core 2 Duo line.
  • yoyohello13 8mo ago
    This is basically the premise of the Fallout universe. I think in the story it was the transistor was never invented though.
  • user3939382 8mo ago
    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.
  • zi2zi-jit 8mo ago
    tbh we'd probably just have really good Forth programmers instead of LLMs. same vibe, fewer parameters.
  • b112 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      > graphics that were wanting Prodigy established a (limited) graphical online service in 1988.
      • antidamage 8mo ago
        I'm imagining that this is the work of the Boy Genuis
    • galangalalgol 8mo ago
      Heavy webpages are the main barrier for projects like this. We need something that is just reader view for everything without the overhead of also being able to do non reader view. Like w3m or lynx but with sane formatting, word wrap etc.
      • rainingmonkey 8mo ago
        You might be interested in the Gemini protocol: https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://geminiprotocol.net/
        • galangalalgol 8mo ago
          I am interested, thank you! I still think there is room to make a text browser that allows as many webpages as possible to be usable without requiring MB of ram per page. You can do things piping curl through pandoc but that isn't terribly useful.
  • antidamage 8mo ago
    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.
  • nicksergeant 8mo ago
    You should definitely watch Maniac: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries)
  • lich_king 8mo ago
    I think the boring answer is that we waste computing resources simply because if memory and CPU cycles are abundant and cheap, developers don't find it worth their time to optimize nearly as much as they needed to optimize in the 1980s or 1990s. Had we stopped with 1990s tech, I don't think that things would have been fundamentally different. 1980s would have been more painful, mostly because limited memory just did not allow for particularly sophisticated graphics. So, we'd be stuck with 16-color aesthetics and you probably wouldn't be watching movies or editing photos on your computer. That would mean a blow to social media and e-commerce too.
    • cogman10 8mo ago
      I don't actually blame dev laziness for the lack of optimization. There is certainly a level of "good enough" that's come in, but a lot of that comes not from devs but from management. But I'll say that part of what has changed how devs program is what's fast and slow has changed from the 90s to today. In the early 90s, you could basically load or store something into memory in 1 or 2 CPU cycles. That meant that datastructures like a linked list were a more ideal than datastructures like an array backed list. There was no locality impact and adding/removing items was faster. The difference in hard drive performance was also notable. One wasteful optimization that started in the late 90s was duplicating assets to make sure they were physically colocated with other data loading. That's because the slowest memory to load in old systems came from the hard drive. Now with SSDs, disk loading can literally be nearly as fast as interactions with GPU memory. Slower than main memory, but not by much. And because SSDs don't suffer as much from random access, it means how you structure data on disk can be wildly different. For example, for spinning disks a b-tree structure is ideal because it reduces the amount of random accesses across the disk. However, for an SSD, a hash datastructure is generally better. But also, the increase of memory has made tradeoffs a lot more worth it. At one point, the best thing you could do is sort your memory in some way (perhaps a tree structure) so that searching for items is faster. That is in-fact built into C++'s `map`. But now, a hash map will eat a bit more memory, but the O(1) lookup is much more ideal in general for storing lookups. Even when we talk about the way memory allocation works, we see that different tradeoffs have been made than would be without a lot of extra memory. State of the art allocators use multiple arenas and memory allocators to allow for multithreaded applications to allocate as fast as possible. That does mean you end up with wasted memory, but you can allocate much faster than you could in days of old. Without that extra memory headroom, you end up with slower allocation algorithms because wasting any space would be devastating. Burning the extra CPU cycles to find a location for allocation ends up being the right trade off.
  • lucaspiller 8mo ago
    I'm in the early phases of working on a game that explores that. The backstory is that in the late 2050s when AI has its hands in everything, humans loose trust of it. There are a few high profile incidents - based on AI decisions -, which cause public opinion to change, and an initiative is brought in to ensure important systems run hardware and software that can be trusted and human reviewed. A 16bit CPU architecture - with no pipelining, speculative execution etc is chosen, as it's powerful enough to run such systems, but also simple enough that a human can fully understand the hardware and software. The goal is to make a near-future space exploration MMO. My Macbook Pro can simulate 3000 CPU cores simultaneously, and I have a lot of fun ideas for it. The irony is that I'm using LLMs to build it :D
  • eqvinox 8mo ago
    You'd probably get much more multiprocessor stuff much earlier. There's probably 2 or 3 really good interfaces to wire an almost arbitrary number of CPUs together and run some software across all of them (AMP not SMP).
  • DeathArrow 8mo ago
    >I sometimes wonder what the alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties would look like. We would have seen much less desktop apps being written using Javascript frameworks.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Gibbon1 8mo ago
    I was doing Schematic Capture and Layout on a 486 with <counts voice> one two three four five six seven eight 8 megabytes of RAM ah haha.
  • Someone 8mo ago
    > Would we still get web browsers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) is from the 1960s, so, technically, it certainly is possible. Whether it would make sense commercially to support a billion users would depend on whether we would stay stuck on prices of the eighties, too. Also, there’s mobile usage. I would it be possible to build a mobile network with thousands of users per km² with tech from the eighties?
  • wolvoleo 8mo ago
    No, if we had the web it would be more like what gopher was. Or maybe lynx. Edit: oh I thought you meant if we were stuck in 6502 style stuff. With megabytes of ram we'd be able to do a lot more. When I was studying we ran 20 X terminals with ncsa mosaic on a server with a few CPUs and 128GB RAM or so. Graphic browsing would be fine. Only when Java and JavaScript came on the scene things got unbearably slow. I guess in that scenario most processing would have stayed server-side.
    • komodo99 8mo ago
      Of course it was fast with that much ram, you'd just cache the entire interwebs. /s
  • ksherlock 8mo ago
    There is an alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties. It's called 1990. Anyhow, the WWW was invented in 1989/1990 on a 25Mhz 68040 NextCube. Strictly speaking, the 68040 and NextCube weren't released until 1990 (and the NeXT was an expensive machine) but they were in development in 1989 so that's not a stretch. Anyhow, WWW isn't really much more than hypercard (1987) with networking.
  • jxdxbx 8mo ago
    I like the 32 bit era because it's the only time we had symmetrical data and address buses. 32 bit data bus on chip. 32 bit addressable RAM, 4 GB. Used to be 8/16 and now it's 64/whatever. Understandable decisions given needs/constraints but sort of messy.
  • anticodon 8mo ago
    > Would we still get web browsers? There was Lynx text browser that was ported even to MS-DOS. I was using it until about 2010. It was a great browser until websites become unusable.
• analog8374 8mo ago
  It's commodore 64 ish. I like it
  • Narishma 8mo ago
    More like Commodore 46.
• ekaryotic 8mo ago
  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-16-core-z80-on-an-fpga/ https://hackaday.com/2019/12/10/laptop-like-its-1979-with-a-...
  • nine_k 8mo ago
    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.
  • shrubble 8mo ago
    The follow on to CPM which ran on the Z80 is MPM which is a multitasking OS.
• kayo_20211030 8mo ago
  Complete madness! But, I love it.
• drkrab 8mo ago
  Way cool! When can I buy one?
• einpoklum 8mo ago
  And it mostly runs Microsoft software, too... Basic from 1977 :-P
  • Tor3 8mo ago
    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 8mo ago
      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.
• detay 8mo ago
  this post made me smile. why not!!! 6502 my first processor. <3
• marcodiego 8mo ago
  Maybe this can achieve RYF certification. What I really would love: modern (continously built) modern (less than 10 years old tech) devices ryf-cetified.
• rustyhancock 8mo ago
  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...
• ted_dunning 8mo ago
  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!
• p0w3n3d 8mo ago
  Wow. It's fresh as a rose! Congratulations!
• louismerlin 8mo ago
  Awesome! Gives me mnt pocket reform vibes. https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform
  • wakest 8mo ago
    lol hi merlin, was peeking in the comments wondering if anyone would say this
• drob518 8mo ago
  Brilliant! I love it. Bonus points for using the eWoz monitor. It’s giving me the itch to build it.
• guidoism 8mo ago
  > Yes, I know I'm crazy, but Any time I see this phrase I know these are my people.
  • readme 8mo ago
    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.
• facorreia 8mo ago
  This would have been absolutely mind blowing back in the day!
• zahlman 8mo ago
  > 46K RAM Not 64? (Edit: I see part of the address space is reserved for ROM, but it still seems a bit wonky.)
  • wkjagt 8mo ago
    The 6502 doesn't have separate io addresses so you need to fit all devices in a 64k space, not just ROM.
    • p0w3n3d 8mo ago
      Atari 130XE used bank switching to handle more memory along with the IO-reserved memory (i.e. you had an address $D301 where you would change bits for the memory bank, and it would redirect $4000 – $7FFF to another bank in the extended memory)
      • wkjagt 8mo ago
        Yeah the Commodore 64 did something similar. I love that era of hardware.
• deckar01 8mo ago
  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.
  • ezulabs 8mo ago
    I stop seeing those issues after starting using Bambulab X1 3d printer, it just works 99 percent of the time. My old ender 3 v2 had those issues due to bed changing its shape during printing(thin metal changing shape in micro level due to temp and mechanical stress with 4 knobs pulling down), not sticking well, not enough fast cooling or cooling effects bed temp profile, way off even with auto level probes. Also open 3d printer with bunch of air flow is a killer for those prints. OP should try Bambulab like enclosed more accurate 3d printer from a local 3d print shop or a hackerspace after locking the design and enclosure iterations.
  • lawn 8mo ago
    With proper bed leveling, meshing, chamber temperature, ears/brim, and glue this shouldn't be a big issue. What printer are you using?
    • deckar01 8mo ago
      Prusa XL with higher temp filament, not enclosed. I was making parts that spanned corner to corner. It works fine once I prevent it from making 400mm linear runs.
• lysace 8mo ago
  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.
  • unimplmntd_trap 8mo ago
    I was recently using this project. It outputs over serial which is handy for capturing a longer stream. I’m working on a wire wrapped 6502 machine and was getting a weird issue where I could see via the Sync pin that it was mis-executing a byte of data as an instruction instead. The fix was to add another decoupling capacitor next to the CPU… https://github.com/dpm-343/6502-monitor https://github.com/dpm-343/6502-monitor
    • lysace 8mo ago
      Neat.
• user3939382 8mo ago
  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.
  • JPLeRouzic 8mo ago
    > "I have an arch trick to give the 6502 tons of memory" Please, what is your trick, is it a variation on bank memories?
• rickcarlino 8mo ago
  Recently purchased a Pocket8086 and I can say – these sorts of things are _very_ fun.
• rbanffy 8mo ago
  6502 based computers shouldn’t have a “dir” command. It’s “catalog” for detailed info or “cat” for the short one.
  • vardump 8mo ago
    No, it should be LOAD "$", 8
• flopsamjetsam 8mo ago
  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).
  • speedgoose 8mo ago
    Looks like 3D printed PLA.
• userbinator 8mo ago
  I wonder how long the battery lasts. The LCD backlight probably draws more power than the CPU (<0.1W, even with no special low-power idle modes.)
• starkeeper 8mo ago
  How about a cassette tape storage?
• HardwareLust 8mo ago
  Serious question; Why 6502?
  • ggm 8mo ago
    BBC Micro, Acorn Atom, Commadore PET. all kinds of home computer. So prime retro material late 70s early 80s. There's a CP/M port. So you can use PIP which traces it's lineage back to the DEC Tops-10 operating system if not beforehand (its a peripheral IO command model, although I think CP/M PIP only shares name) Add a DIN plug and record programs in Kansas City Standard on a cassette recorder. Could be a walkman. A floppy (full 8" type) was a luxury. Almost a megabyte! imagine what you can do.. when a program is the amount of text you can fit in the VBI of a ceefax/teletext broadcast, or is typed in by hand in hex. Kansas city standard is 300 bits/second and the tape plays in real-time so a standard C60 is like 160kb on both sides if you were lucky: it misread and miswrote a LOT. I used to do tabular GOTO jump table text adventures, and use XOR screen line drawing to do moving moire pattern interference fringes. "mod scene" trippy graphics! Thats a mandelbrot in ASCII, the best I've seen, on the web page. Super stuff. People wrote tiny languages for the 6502. integer only but C like syntax, or Pascal or ALGOL. People did real science in BASIC, a one weekend course got you what you needed to do some maths for a Masters or PHD in some non CS field. My friends did a lot more of this than me. Because I had access to a Dec-10 and a PDP-11 at work and later Vax/VMS and BSD UNIX systems, I didn't see the point of home machines. A wave I wish I'd ridden but not seeing the future emerge has been a constant failure of mine.
    • p0w3n3d 8mo ago
      I wrote (mostly copied from printed code and altered) games in BASIC. Too bad I had not enough understanding what could have been done in the assembly language... Now I keep rediscovering them, but it's only for the sake of nostalgia (and personal development)
  • wvenable 8mo ago
    The 6502 is the best 8bit CPU for learning stuff. There's a lot you could add to it, but there is very little could take away. It's minimal but you have everything you need.
• bananaboy 8mo ago
  Wow! Now this is cool!
• engineer_22 8mo ago
  TIL Atari Lynx was a handheld competitor to GameBoy .... Was launched with a 65C2 processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Lynx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Lynx
• xx__yy 8mo ago
  Legend!!!
• aa-jv 8mo ago
  Nice one - the prototype sure reminds me of the early OpenPandora days ..
• billygoat 8mo ago
  Wait, there is an 800x480 display connected, but the thing only has 46k of RAM. There's no explanation of the display approach being used. The extended graphics commands seem to allow X/Y positioning with an 8-bit color. I think the picture shows an 80x25 screen? What gives here? Anyone know what's going on?
  • jensgk 8mo ago
    It probably has a character mapped display, so you can only display 256 different (ascii and graphics) characters in a memory mapped 80*25 = 2000 bytes display buffer. EDIT: I can now see that is does have bit mapped graphics. It must have a built-in serial like terminal with graphics capabilities. EDIT2: Probably using this chip: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1590 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1590 :-)
  • alnwlsn 8mo ago
    The display controller they are using (RA8875 or RA8889) has several hundred KB of internal memory. So you can write to the screen and the image will "stay there" as it were, you don't have to store a framebuffer or keep writing out the image like with a CRT.
• lloydatkinson 8mo ago
  This was very interesting until I saw it had a Pi Pico for some reason
• jrmg 8mo ago
  I love this. It always mildly tickles me when retrocomputer designs use anachronistic processors way more powerful than the CPU in their design - in this case, there’s a ATmega644 as a keyboard controller (64K ROM - although only 4K RAM, up to 20MHz) and presumably something pretty powerful in the display board.
• Western0 8mo ago
  This dev can working more than a week on one AA battery?