alt Hacker NewsImagine in steampunk fashion wed get an alternative future timeline where computer tech froze in 80s due to some physical limitation that prohibited shrinking transistors. all typical laptops would have same config as this awesome project. what would the society become?
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I believe the actual silicon of a 6502 is much smaller than the DIP package, so even if we couldn't shrink the silicon itself much more, you could just take up more space inside the package, and use a package that has more pins in it, like current CPU designs. You would probably hit a bottleneck at some point since I believe the speed of light is a problem for processing speed at some point, but then I'd expect we'd just go into massively parallel systems, with multiple cores acting somewhat individually
Isn't this basically the idea behind collapse os? Chin up! That could still be our future.
I was thinking lately about how much memory you could handle on a 6502. The BBC Micro had a 16KB block of RAM paged between up to 16 ROMs/RAM but if you could have 256 banks you could do 4MB. One problem is that that would require a very large PCB. Another problem is that the OS searches for commands on all the ROMs and this would become slow for so many banks; one solution would be to limit the ROMs to the first few banks and let the rest be RAM.
It could be useful for some sort of minicomputer for business applications.
> Imagine in steampunk fashion
See The 8-bit Guy regarding what the world would be like if we were still limited to vacuum tubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEpnRM97ACQ (video)
Apple XXVgs and Amiga 15,000, I’m digging this alternative.
Laptops would be a lot less common. If computers were stuck in this era for that long, fewer people would be interested. Prices would be high.
Speed certainly wouldn't be there, but capabilities would. Plenty could get done on those old machines — most of it had to do with programmers having the imagination & skill to be able to shoehorn their ideas into spaces they weren't meant to be crammed into.
One memory this project brought to mind for me was a hack I came across which allowed simultaneously running DOS 3.3 & ProDOS on a 128k Apple II, giving each 64k (well, a little less due to overhead) & a way to switch between the two with a simple command. Two programs couldn't run at once, but one could step between the two OSes to run programs made for each pretty seamlessly. If this sort of thing was possible on basic consumer hardware, ten or twenty years of development would have led to many far more interesting & useful things.