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.
Hypercard was absolutely dope as an entry-level programming environment.
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 person 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.
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.
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.
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.
My Vic20 could do this, and a C64 easily, really it was just graphics that were wanting.
I was sending electronic messages around the world via FidoNet and PunterNet, downloaded software, was on forums, and that all on BBSes.
When I think of the web of old, it's the actual information I love.
And a terminal connected to a bbs could be thought of as a text browser, really.
I even connectd to CompuServe in the early 80s via my C64 through "datapac", a dial gateway via telnet.
ANSI was a standard too, it could have evolved further.
Prodigy established a (limited) graphical online service in 1988.
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
https://www.symbos.org/shots.htm
This is what slow computers with a few hundred kB of RAM can do.
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.
Web pages took a minute to load, now we're optimising them for instant response.
I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad. I avoided dialup if I could because it was slow. Even isdn was okay speeds.
Your claim that I responded to was that web browsers were just as fast on 25MHz CPUs.
> I had t3 connections for most of my browsing which was faster than ethernet of the day - even by todays standards that isn't too bad.
T3 speeds are very slow in today's terms. Even my cell phone does a couple orders of magnitude better from where I'm sitting.
There are a lot of weird claims going on in your posts. I think it's a lot of nostalgia coloring your views of how fast things were in the past.
This is the same pattern you see in politics when people on all sides (even the nominally progressive ones) lie to each other about how great the olden days were, when in reality it's all about their dissatisfaction with the present day.
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
This is like saying Victorian Britain wasn't polluted, except for all the coal burning.
Try using a 2400baud modem, that was slow
Because all of the complicated client side stuff was in Java applets or Shockwave :( Pepperidge Farm remembers having to wait 10 minutes for a GameBoy emulator to load to play Pokémon Yellow on school computers…
BBSes existed at the same time and if you were into BBSes you were obsessive about it.
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.
People that time were not actually sure how long the improvements would go on.
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).
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.
As much as I like my Apple Silicon Mac I could do everything I need to on 2008 hardware.
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.
Schedule+, which was contained in Windows for Workgroups 3.11, contained address book functionalities that were clearly better than Cardfile.
But people used Cardfile for many other different purposes than serving as an address book.
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.
Only thing that killed web for old computers is JAVASCRIPT.
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).
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.
Ironically, now I'm using an ESP32-S3, 10x more powerful, just to run Iot devices.
Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)
I can see it now… the a national lab can run ImageNet, but it takes so many nodes with unobtanium 3dfx stuff that you have to wait 24 hours for a run to be scheduled and completed.
HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994.
DoubleClick was founded in 1995.
Neither were limited to 90's hardware:
Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.
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
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.