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1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 11:19:28 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

   Re: How amazingly empty modern mother boards are

   libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-5…

   If you go back 15 years, there'd be a south bridge, a north bridge, memory slots, some other stuff. Go back 10 years more and there'd be an audio chip, a video chip, USB controller, capacitors everywhere ... go back another 10 years and they wouldn't even be surface mounted, they'd be in sockets.

   Go back to the 80s and you'd even have rows and rows of dumb logic gate chips! Just a handful of NOR gates taking up a whole chip, like two square centimeters of space! And your parallel, serial and IDE ports would be on an expansion card!

   It makes me feel old to have seen all this pass, but I'm not old enough to have seen the old IBM mainframe computers where even the CPU itself was too big to be a single integrated chip.

   1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 11:49:05 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

      in reply to

      Imagine what amazing and weird things we could build with all this space and power we have!

      And yet all we do is build very large and very fast slightly tweaked IBM PS/2s. And then program them with either (1) a language that pretends to build for 1970s mini computers or (2) something that interoperates with that language or (3) a language written in that language.

      I get why. It makes a lot of sense. We're actually changing the situation in small but exciting ways. But overall it's all booooring and the only big stuff we have added in 40 years is sugar, frameworks, tools to handle business control processes (some of which are genuinely helpful! but boooring!), and complexity.

      1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 13:06:48 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

         in reply to

         As someone pointed out the other day in a thread: Even gaming consoles are just boring PCs with a different OS now.

         No more exotic CPUs controlling some weird niche coprocessors that only a lone genius in a basement in Hull can figure out how to use effectively. Just a multicore CPU, a GPU and some USB ports.

         1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 05-Aug-2024 13:46:24 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

            in reply to

            Where are our Forth processors, our object processors, like those Lisp and SmallTalk processors with gc and type affordances in hardware, our clockless asynchronous processors, our Transmeta-like fluid lines between hardware and software, between microcode and ISA-targeted machine code, etc.

            How weird do our high-level languages need to be to benefit from an exotic CPU?

            JavaScript and even more so Python are embarrassingly non-weird, so imperative and linear that they trip up anything that wants any assurances, but my go-to expectation is that functional languages might do cool stuff with immutability, upfront data dependencies etc. And packages within meh languages might do cool stuff, like pandas and numpy within Python.