Transputers. Lots and lots and lots of transputers. (-:

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.

> 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

> One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)

Apart from transputers mentioned already, there’s 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

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS

Show that we could have had quality desktops and mobile devices

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We did have web browsers, I had Internet Explorer on Windows 3.1, 33mhz 8mb RAM.

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine

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.

I remember using the web in the 90s. I often left to make a sandwich while pages loaded.

Try opening Gmail on one of those. Won’t be fun.

Depends how pervasive OC3 would have gotten. A 1080p video stream is only about 7 Mbps today.

I have a Hayes 9600kbps modem for web surfing.

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.

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.

As someone has brought up, Transputers (an early parallel architecture) was a thing in the 1980s because people thought CPU speed was reaching a plateau. They were kind of right (which is why modern CPUs are multicore) but were a decade or so too early so transputers failed in the market.

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.

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.

Given enough power and space efficiency you would start putting multiple cpus together for specialized tasks. Distributed computing could have looked differently

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.

> I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz.

I know it’s a meme on HN to complain that modern websites are slow, but this is a perfect example of how completely distorted views of the past can get.

No, browsing the web in the early 90s was slooow. Even simple web pages took a long time to load. As you said, internet connections were very slow too. I remember visiting pages with photos that would come with a warning about the size of the page, at which point I’d get up and go get a drink or take a break while it loaded. Then scrolling pages with images would feel like the computer was working hard.

It’s silly to claim that 90s web browsers ran about as fast as they do today.

I still remember the Mosaic from NCSA. Internet in a box.

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.

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.

You only have to bundle about 110 ISDN channels to transfer that (four E1 or five T1 trunk lines).

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).

> 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.

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.

“Web surfing” sounds so much healthier than “doom scrolling”…

Probably was "Windows 3.11, For Workgroups" as iirc Windows 3.1 didn't ship with a TCP/IP stack

Not JavaScript. Facebook.

The Classic Mac OS model in general I think is the best that has been or ever will be in terms of sheer practical user power/control/customization thanks to its extension and control panel based architecture. Sure, it was a security nightmare, but there was practically nothing that couldn’t be achieved by installing some combination of third party extensions.

Even modern desktop Linux pales in comparison because although it’s technically possible to change anything imaginable about it, to do a lot of things that extensions did you’re looking at at minimum writing your own DE/compositor/etc and at worst needing to tweak a whole stack of layers or wade through kernel code. Not really general user accessible.

Because extensions were capable of changing anything imaginable and often did so with tiny-niche tweaks and all targeted the same system, any moderately technically capable could stack extensions (or conversely, disable system-provided ones which implemented a lot of stock functionality) and have a hyper-personalized system without ever writing a line of code or opening a terminal. It was beautiful, even if it was unstable.

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.

CPU cores are still getting faster, but not at the 1980/90s cadence. We get away with that because the cores have been good enough for a decade - unless you are doing heavy data crunching, the cores will spend most of the time waiting for you to do something. I sometimes produce video and the only times I hear the fans turning on is when I am encoding content. And even then, as long as ffmpeg runs with `nice -n 19`, I continue working normally as if I had the computer all to myself.

I cannot recall crashes being a problem.

Browsing the web was slow, because the network was slow. It wasn't really because the desktop computers were slow. I remember our company having just a 64 kbit/s connection to the 'net, even as late as in 1997.. well, that was pretty good compared to the place where I was contracted to at the time, in Italy.. they had 19.2 kbit/s. Really big sites could have something much better, and browsing the internet at their sites was a different experience then, using the same computers.

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)

This was the Amiga. Custom coprpcessors for sound, video, etc.

There was a sockets API though (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.

This is probably me experiencing a simulacra but with that slow loading getting up to go get a drink workflow, each page load was more special. It was magical discovering new websites just like trying out new software by picking something up from those "pegboards" at computer stores.

It also was a simpler time, the technology was in peoples lives but as a small side quest to their main lives. It took the form of a bulky desktop in the den or something like that. When you walked away from that beige box, it didn't follow or know about the rest of your life.

A life where a Big Mac meal was only $2.99, a toyota corolla was $9-15k, houses were ~100k, and when average dev salaries were ~50k. That was a different life. I don't know why but I picture this music video that was included on the Windows 95 cd bonus folder when I think of this simulacra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc

Yeah slow?

Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow

Netscape 2 support javascript on 16-bit Windows 3.1

No, I think he’s right. I don’t recall the web being any faster today than it was thirty years ago, download speed excepted. The overall experience is about the same, if not worse, IMO.

what a glorious time that was! now it's too easy to get stuck looking at the stream of (usually AI generated) crap. I long for the time when the regular screen break was built-in.

> 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.

Commodore 64 and Ataris had intelligent peripherals. Commodore’s drive knew about the filesystem and could stream the contents of a file to the computer without the computer ever becoming aware of where the files were on the disk. They also could copy data from one disk to another without the computer being involved.

Mainframes are also like that - while a PDP-11 would be interrupted every time a user at a terminal pressed a key, IBM systems offloaded that to the terminals, that kept one or more screens in memory, and sent the data to another computer, a terminal controller, that would, then, and only then, disturb the all important mainframe with the mundane needs or its users.

3.11 was so much nicer than 3.1 (and 3.0) I can’t imagine not moving to it as soon as possible.

Why would you make an exception for download speed? It was the reason why the internet was slow back then.

This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.

I was like 11 at the time buying computer stuff with lawn care earnings so I used whatever I could get my hands on. :)

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 did not contain Cardfile. :-(