alt Hacker NewsFor 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.
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Given enough power and space efficiency you would start putting multiple cpus together for specialized tasks. Distributed computing could have looked differently
There's something to this. The 200-400MHz era was roughly where hardware capability and software ambition were in balance — the OS did what you asked, no more.
What killed that balance wasn't raw speed, it was cheap RAM. Once you could throw gigabytes at a problem, the incentive to write tight code disappeared. Electron exists because memory is effectively free. An alternate timeline where CPUs got efficient but RAM stayed expensive would be fascinating — you'd probably see something like Plan 9's philosophy win out, with tiny focused processes communicating over clean interfaces instead of monolithic apps loading entire browser engines to show a chat window.
The irony is that embedded and mobile development partially lives in that world. The best iOS and Android apps feel exactly like your description — refined, responsive, deliberate. The constraint forces good design.
I loved System 7 for its simplicity yet all of the potential it had for individual developers.
Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.