1990, meet 2018: How far does 20MHz of Macintosh IIsi power go today?
It turns out you can use a nearly 30-year-old bit of hardware for today's demands.
@niconiconi @ajroach42 @djsundog
"""
A modern computer, something a thousand times faster than the IIsi, might imply that I'm completing a thousand tasks at once or one task a thousand times faster. Neither is the case—all those open tabs, unread messages, and pending updates are a drain on resources, both computational and personal.
"""
@niconiconi @ajroach42 @djsundog
"""
In contrast, taking the IIsi through its paces was a joy. The limitations of the machine, with barely enough power to run more than one application at once, demands your attention to be 100 percent devoted to any single task. Paradoxically, it often felt like I was more productive with significantly fewer resources at hand. It captured and holds my attention on a single problem, rather than splitting my attention across dozens of unrelated tasks.
"""
@uranther @ajroach42 @djsundog
"""
A modern computer [...] might imply that I'm completing a thousand tasks at once or one task a thousand times faster. Neither is the case [...]
"""
In fact the user interface of a modern computer is MUCH MORE SLOWER. Thousand-times-faster hardware allowed developers to create programs at a highly-abstracted level with multiple advanced features, which in turn eliminated the improvement of processing speed.
Looks at this comparison.
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
@niconiconi This is a great page of scientific endeavor. I love the discussion about #complexity!
@niconiconi @uranther Yeah... As a short term workaround, I've been running a local proxy on a raspberry pi. The pi is wired to the vintage machine, and serves the proxy, but that's not a long term solution, IMO.
@uranther @ajroach42 "barely enough power to run more than one application"
**COUGH**Amiga**COUGH**
20MHz 68030 would have given mainframe-class performance with a proper operating system for it. Hell, I still remember how pleasant a 20MHz VAX was with over a hundred attached terminals.
AmigaOS wasn't perfect either, but its use of preemptive multitasking made all the difference. MacOS System 7 was pretty, but it was a very sub-optimal design due to its System 1 compatibility requirements.
@uranther @ajroach42 (For starters, it used cooperative multitasking. But even then, a task switch was *very* expensive because it had to swap out a chunk of globally shared address space. It was like trying to get MS-DOS "taskers" to multitask by faking a task-switch as quickly as possible.)
@vertigo @uranther @ajroach42 MacOS's cooperative multitasking from that day - when a user held down the mouse button for too long, the network stack wouldn't get a chance to run! http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/Don-t-do-that-then-.html
@niconiconi @uranther @ajroach42 Thanks for the link. I wasn't aware of this bit of history. :-)
@niconiconi @vertigo @uranther @ajroach42 little known fact that #Apple decided to replicate this user experience on iPhone 4: https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
History repeats itself: the article even starts with te same joke!
@uranther @ajroach42 @niconiconi I wanna make something like this with a RISC-V on an FPGA... 20MIPS would be acceptable performance if there was a hardware blitter and sound
@uranther @ajroach42 @niconiconi granted, this Mac was more like 9MIPS
@ddipaola @uranther @ajroach42 the HiFive1 RISC-V devboard runs at 320 MHz and is a perfect candidate for this project, but it only has 16 KiB of on-chip RAM... Not sure if using on-bus RAM chip would have acceptable latency comparable to an Apple 2e. If yes, perhaps good to go!
@niconiconi @ddipaola Soon I'll play with my #HiFive1 and can do some measurements.
@niconiconi @uranther @ajroach42 yeah, I'm more looking for a CPU with an exposed bus. otherwise, I could try and write an emulator that runs bare metal on a commodity ARM SoC
@uranther @ajroach42
A friend of mine had one of these in 1991, and it was so much better than my similarly-spec'ed (on paper) 386, that it was ridiculous.
@ajroach42
@uranther
I think the biggest difference was that the system bus and SCSI drives were a lot better than the bus and hard drive controller on a 386 of that era. My experience improved a lot after installing OS/2 on that machine, but still had to deal with io contention a lot.
@uranther Neat!
I've nearly got my Mac Plus set up to be my main workstation for when I'm done with serious work for the day.
I need a stable internet connection at home to finish and test my setup.
Love that portrait monitor - I used to have one oriented like that, great for reading docs and stuff
@hyperlinkyourheart @ajroach42 It's one of the best uses for widescreen monitors these days.
@uranther @ajroach42 Looks like porting a minimal SSL/TLS library (like mbedtls) to these systems is going to be a valuable work that needs to be done.