4 ms·
I always wondered what if time hardware development stopped in 1969: how far we couuld go with such machines with new fresh software? :)
by iberator 4mo ago
I always wondered what if time hardware development stopped in 1969: how far we couuld go with such machines with new fresh software? :)
- dhosek 4mo agoA lot of our software really depends on things like fast disks and significant memory. I think we might have ended up with the development of memory-constrained algorithms that don’t exist now, and computing would be very much a batch-mode endeavor rather than the interactive process we have now.
- bitwize 4mo agoIn 1969 we had Lisp, and the PDP-10. Interactive computing was very doable even then. I'm sure Stallman would have love for ITS on the 10 to have remained the default.
- pjmlp 4mo agoThe tragedy is that some folks 57 years later, still think their computers cannot handle something like Lisp, or languages with similar tooling.
- protocolture 4mo agoEither it wouldnt have taken off or it would just be serial cable back to big mainframes.
- userbinator 4mo agoThe demoscene shows what's possible with machines from the early 80s.
- rahen 4mo agoNot very far off, the IBM 1130 was very much built around its punch-card reader. I've written a backprop in Fortran IV for the 1130 and while it works, it was tedious. Add ten more years, and the IBM 801 could have been a CPU architecture good enough to scale all the way to the present day without emulation, unlike the 360.