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   Fionnáin (ephemeral@mograph.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 01:24:22 JST Fionnáin

   • alcinnz

   @alcinnz I'd like to read that discussion but can't find it after a quick peek. Is it on your website?

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 01:24:21 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     @ephemeral I haven't published it yet, I've only just started linkifying it! Combined with other topics, I should have them published within a month from now.

     And it was quite a while ago now, so I'm not surprised you're having trouble digging it up.

     That said I'm not sure I will publish the fedi's fav NES games.

     I can re-toot some of my notes for you?

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     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 03:43:14 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     @ephemeral The tl;dr; is that I reason that a web browser could be implemented largely using hardware designed for parsing & serializing data, basically variations upon memory circuits.

     What little arithmetic processing that leaves would more than fit in a 6502-era computer. I explored a design which had more memory (and a barrel shifter), but is otherwise very comparable!

     Then there's the question of GPUs... What we have now is more than a browser needs, what we had then is less than desired.

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     Fionnáin (ephemeral@mograph.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 03:43:15 JST Fionnáin

     in reply to

     • alcinnz

     @alcinnz no that's OK if you'll be publishing the links, but thanks for the offer. No need to go rooting around. But if you're not publishing then I'd love to have a wee look.

     Not as worried about the favourite NES games, that's just for fun. But interested in how your program holds up to an 8-bit machine. I've been trying to scale back my programs recently and wondering if I need to limit my hardware to really set a boundary for myself.

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     Fionnáin (ephemeral@mograph.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 07:00:15 JST Fionnáin

     in reply to

     • alcinnz

     @alcinnz yeah I did read your post a while back where you talked about a kind of 'golden age' in the early 2000s, where the hardware was just enough for what was needed. It's interesting to imagine these moments, and how we could sit with them if we could be a little more patient.

     I'm doing some work on the development of fiber optic cables at the minute, and it's making me think about how that technology pushed a certain type of hardware and software that couldn't have developed without.

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     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Thursday, 16-Jan-2025 07:19:13 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     @ephemeral I love thinking through how things could be different!

     I do appreciate solid-state drives, & I can see the value in fully-programable GPUs... Or widespread fiber... I don't think I appreciate much else in computing since mid-2000s...

     Cryptography improved, & we have CRDTs & DGGS now. But that's software!

     Going back to 1980s meanwhile, I think (if your software supported that hardware) most people would probably complain about the limited memory before the limited CPU!