My Dream Computer | Hacker News Reader

My Dream Computer

bluelander.bearblog.dev

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I think I don't dream so much of a computer. Modern machines are pretty dreamy,to be honest.

Sure, I wax mystical of the old days, but I also know how absolutely constricting those old days were in terms of capability that I just take completely for granted today. My iMac at home has 72GB of RAM, TBs of storage, most, though not all SSD. It has a screen comparable to a drive in theater.

I have Time Machine to keep me out of trouble. Dropbox to squirrel things away off my machine. I have BackBlaze to save me from a utter catastrophe. Both require pretty much zero thought or maintenance.

I have amazing facilities at my fingertips. The idea that I have something as extraordinary as Postgres sitting idle in the background just waiting for a muse to strike me is amazing. I come from a time when having access to an SQL DB was a Big Deal.

I still yell at it. It still gasps and wheezes at times. I think the I/O subsystem on the Mac has more interactive impact than it should. The machine beachballs when an external drive wakes up.

C'est la vie.

What I would like, is connectivity. That is, I have "good" residential internet. Solid download bandwidth, "good enough" upload bandwidth.

But it's just a consumer. I don't have a passion for having an actual presence "on the information superhighway", but, like having Postgres just sitting there idle, I'd like to be able to have the whimsy to do so.

I could just get a VPS, or whatever. Which really brings up the salient point.

Exposing a machine to the wild, wild, net is "dangerous". Not to be done blindly or casually. I wish that weren't the case.

As Sun Microsystems used to say: "The network is the computer". But the network is dangerous. My dream computer would be able to live in a safer place.

I was never a fan of high-spec setups. I operate several discrete low-resource machines which all have a single purpose. One for gaming, another for casual surfing of the web, Raspberry Pi for tinkering and coding, etc

These types pushing the envelope of a high-spec machine 'Because they can' is madness, when we had to be very economical of system resources in the past just to display basic 3D graphics (look up the demoscene).

Anyway, horses for courses. People are gonna do this, running multiple Adobe products, multiple Electron-powered apps, browsers, games, all running at the same time. I guess if you have the hardware, why not?

For more than 20 years a have a reaccuring dream for a couple of times a year. In the dream I find a shop or flea-market with vintage computers. It is chuck-full of the most wonderful vintage computers, quirky handhelds and other special electronics. I am in heaven but always I am just to late and the place is permanently closing. It is closing hour and I cannot buy anything anymore.

In my dream I always find a flea market with all sorts of vintage electronics, but it's invariably selling for insanely high prices because "retro" has become a fad among greedy collectors hoping to make a quick buck. At least the high prices act as an incentive to keep the stuff out of landfills.

In some respects, we are lucky. Most vintage computers sell for less than they were new. That is before accounting for inflation. Many collectables cost an order of magnitude more (if not more) after accounting for inflation. In other words, there is a better chance that we can afford to relive our childhood than those who had other interests! Then there is the community itself, where it still seems to be possible to get vintage gear on the cheap if they're convinced it will go to a good home.

> Most vintage computers sell for less than they were new. That is before accounting for inflation.

If you base it on original MSRP, I have well north of a million dollars in older and/or vintage hardware, not accounting for inflation. Resell value today? Maybe a couple grand, if I really tried hard enough.

It sort of happened to me in real life in the early 90s. There was a small used music instrument shop in a small street. That Friday afternoon I got in and there was a Rhodes seventy-three, good as new. I lifted the cover and there still were the spare "hammers" in a plastic bag inside. I plugged it in an old amp that was around and it sounded just beautifully. I was a poor student back then, but the nice old guy in the shop told me it was less than $300. OK, I'll be back Monday! The following week, the shop was closed, never to open again.

The next time I've seen a Rhodes 73 for sale a couple years later, it was more than 6 times more expensive. At some point a good 73 cost as much as $8/10000, though they're now down to $4/5000.

Yeah. Design aesthetics were just so much better twenty years ago. I'd kill for a Sony X505 with modern internals: https://scr.wfcdn.de/9699/Sony-VAIO-X505-mit-Mac-OS-X-139161...

Why is there OS X on its screen?

There was a story in 2014 that Jobs had considered partnering with Sony on projects: http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.htm...

> Steve Jobs and another Apple executive were waiting for us at the end of golf course holding VAIO running Mac OS" recalls Ando; 2001 is the year,

A German site picked up the story and created that mockup (which wouldn't've fit the story; the X505 shipped in 2003): https://winfuture.de/news,80151.html

It's a mockup but it's the nicest picture of the X505 I could find.

This sounds like a pretty clear message from your subconscious...

My dream computers tend to be handheld personal organizers with secret backdoors to the internet or hidden hacking features. They usually have strange monochrome displays. I love these dreams and wake up with with an intense sense of loss. My android phone is a million times more capable but doesn't spark the childlike hunger I feel for my mystical dream handhelds.

There's something about constrained computing environments isn't there?

I do feel for those sensibilities. It's like steampunk trying to realize the character in the waking world--but not quite with the full suspension of disbelief.

I got psyched by a dream once, I woke from a dream pleased to realize that the crystal structure from the dream was still here with me. I remember saying (while looking up at the structure), "That's nice usually when you wake up from a dream you don't get to keep things". Then I woke up.

Some of the most silly fun I've had is with KnightOS [0], on a tiny TI-83+. A calculator, monochrome screen, but with a full C compiler on board, but available memory measured in kilobytes.

[0] https://knightos.org/

A PocketChip like device with an Alpine/OpenWRT like OS with a QWERTY keyboard and a clamshell design. But cheap, no more than $100, unlike the OpenPandora.

So like a Ben NanoNote, then?

Mmhh, no. I had a zipit z2, and it was close. Something with a better and slightly bigger keyboard, with the size of a Nintendo DS. Enough to SSH confortabilty and run stuff well under CWM.

Clockwork Pi stuff may interest you. I have their DevTerm with an R01 SoM. It's fun and reminds me of older stuff.

https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-r01

Zero Terminal v3 from N.O.D.E.: https://n-o-d-e.net/zeroterminal3.html

This kind of post on HN usually continues for 5000 words, a dozen pictures with screwdrivers, and a URL where you can login to the machine which is now running 1997-era BSD

And the title is “Getting Started with 486 Assembly”

I had a dream once that a coworker had discovered, and was trying to understand a mission-critical system running on an old, unusual computer. "Maybe bitwize can help us out here," she said. "This certainly looks like his kind of thing." So I went over.

The computer was a kind of Lisp machine. It had an ordinary CPU, but custom firmware and an unusual boot process: A very small, binary microkernel provided enough of a Lisp environment to bootstrap the rest of the system which, for security reasons, was streamed in in source form over a UART via an attached, dedicated computer (something small like an Arduino). You could literally watch it initialize first the device drivers, then the file systems and network stack, and finally bring up a window system with a decently modern GUI, all by evaluating streamed-in Lisp source, after which the application -- a service that handled arcane business logic for some obscure but important corner of our company -- was loaded and run. I managed to get an editor running and opened the source code of the OS. It was one of the most straightforward, beautiful pieces of code I'd ever seen. Tremendous power could be afforded the user in inspiringly few lines of code, yet still be completely readable and understandable.

Shortly after having this dream I discovered GNU Mes, an attempt to bootstrap the entire GNU universe using a Scheme interpreter and a C compiler that can mutually bootstrap each other.

For me, LispM was half-way down a world-falling-apart backwards-life nightmare. Something very vaguely like: It started happy with a "dancing code" dream, sort of group-collaborative VR-ish with AI. But became things-going-increasingly-badly, with (an old side project's) laptop with camera tracking, VR, and keyboard as multitouch surface, initially working well (mine didn't) but increasingly broken, with full-speed fan hiss (did). Then a hissing-vent MIT office with Symbolics but a space cadet keyboard - "I want this to be fun ... but it's so very clunky". Then IBM PC but C++ and sad baffled "it's not working?!?" no multiple dispatch (pet peeve). Then the hiss and "chunk, chunk chunk chunk" of a (high-school) IBM card punch - "I don't want to do this anymore". Sigh. Then waking up from the nightmare... but only part way.

> GNU Mes

For browsing, here's (a random fork of) mescc[1] and mes[2].

[1] https://github.com/oriansj/mes-m2/tree/master/module/mescc [2] https://github.com/oriansj/mes-m2/tree/master/src

My dream computer is kind of a modern-day Commodore-64. You turn the manual, physical power switch on and it is "totally booted, display on, and ready for user input" in 250ms. Single-user, single-process, single 64-bit address space, a fixed and well-documented memory map within that address space containing your RAM and also things like kernel system calls, peripheral I/O ports, character ROM, display RAM, graphics and sound interfaces, and so on. Your initial UI is simply a command-line REPL for some language (maybe Python?) so you can just start hacking right away. No "operating system" that starts 200 processes just to boot the machine. No filesystem, no memory protection, no background caches doing god-knows-what. Just your CPU doing that one thing you told it to be doing.

So... TempleOS?

Raspberry Pi with bare metal Smalltalk/Squeak is the kernel of this.

A Smalltalk with a boatload of RAM but actually running in a persistent, Virtual Memory environment. Some way to not have to "save" images, but at the same time a way to recover when you fat finger and delete the "Object" class from your image and murder it. Smalltalk will let you do that. You'll regret it, but it'll let you do it.

But other than that, the VM is the file system. Your email inbox is just an array named "inbox", stored in persistent VM, paged to and from disk as necessary. With 64GB of RAM, 4TB of disk, you cache "everything" eventually.

I just don't know how to get the virtual memory part to save stuff to disk properly. Maybe save the VM pages to something like an append only CouchDB style file store, that way it's easy to rollback when you bork something up. Every 6 months you'll need to vacuum the datastore to reclaim dead pages.

> … but at the same time a way to recover when you fat finger and delete the "Object" class from your image and murder it. Smalltalk will let you do that. You'll regret it, but it'll let you do it.

Doesn't Smalltalk let you rollback the changes file to just before you borked something up?

"The storage of changes in the Smalltalk-80 system takes two forms: an internal form as a set of changes (actually a set of objects describing changes), and an external form as a file on which your actions are logged while you are working (in the form of executable expressions or expressions that can be filed into a system). … All the information stored in the internal change set is also written onto the changes file."

1984 Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment page 461

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...

To recover in normal Smalltalk, you revert to a known good image, and then roll forward changes from the Changes file, ideally not executing that last bit that killed it in the first place.

I would think this would be challenging a world where you have a single, very large, persistent image (at least as naively presented as I have). You have no "known good" image to revert to.

For this use case, there is no "file system". Just the living image -- and it's big, ostensibly larger than RAM.

So, rather, you'd want something like the write-ahead log in databases, but one that you can roll back through a primitive restart process to a known good point.

This is why I mentioned CouchDB which versions all of its page writes making recovery from catastrophe possible (at a not small cost of garbage collection).

And, I appreciate the difficulty. Imagine simply having a thread tracking a real time clock. Every second a page gets persisted to the disk...tic tic tic. 86000 pages a day, just "sitting idle".

Or does it? Maybe pages never get persisted to disk until snapshot or swapped out. (And since you have stupid amounts of memory, swapping is rare).

Anyway, just musing.

> … a world where you have a single, very large, persistent image (at least as naively presented as I have). You have no "known good" image to revert to.

I'm finding it difficult to understand how we would both have a "persistent image" and not have a "known good" image to revert to.

Seems as though deleting Object might well prevent the image being persisted.

Speaking of modern day c64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhdc-jgwqVQ

The introduction of the Lappy 486: https://youtu.be/dmzk5y_mrlg

"Finally, a computer for your lap!"

I’m fairly certain I had a computer exactly like that, but gray, with a monochrome orange screen.

I don't know what the English term is, but in German that's called a "Bernstein" Display. (Amber)

I had a dream where the best lappy I ever saw was in my hands. I tried to hold it while I lucidly tried to wake up. Had nothing in my bed.

Tried it with money before too. Just doesn't work.

Not yet anyway :)

When I was a kid I remembered that I had my dream computer, an Amiga 500, in the closet! Then I woke up.

It was nice to hear Strong Bad mentioned. Been a while…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Bad

Had to stop myself from losing several hours watching emails. I’m sure I would have ended up watching all of Teen Girl Squad. Or starting a light switch rave.

But he was still.... Trogdor!!!!!

... The BURNINATOR!!!!#

Cue the most awesomest chip tune theme you have ever heard and ever will hear in your life.

Trogdor was a man...

I mean, he was a dragon-man...

You rang?

The scroll, the scroll, the button, the button Scrollin' so smooth like the butter on a muffin

Yeah, I was wondering: Why is he not showing the real computer, but the Tandy instead? By the end it became clear, hehehe.

I read the whole thing twice before realizing it was a joke/dream. :)

That's quite a vivid imagination he has, for sure. I wonder how much of it was dream and how much of it was fleshed out after the fact.

Nah 486 computers had way more RAM thatn 512k and larger drives than 2MB.

My dream computer is a big noisy box that lives in a corner of my basement. That machine is my desktop, my laptop, my work machine, and my gaming machine. I can take any computer with a network connection, ping the noisy box, and I've got a desktop environment that is in the exact state I left it in. I want to shut down my main workstation at home, and open my laptop at work to the exact same windows and files I had open an hour ago. When my computer is old, I want to buy one (1) set of new hardware, throw it in the noisy box and just get back to work. I don't want to buy multiple new laptops and build an entirely new desktop machine every N years.

In a pinch, I can plug my phone into a monitor to show a file. I can use any random untrusted machine to open a window into my secure system. I don't have to synchronize files because they're all on the machine.

Basically, I want my computer to not physically exist. I want my computer where I am, regardless of the hardware in front of me.

I have an obsolete server in my basement now that represents more raw power than all of my conventional machines combined (except for GPU). And yet I still have to maintain four(!) individual machines in various physical locations.

I'm tired of having multiple computers. I already have one that can do everything, so why can't it just do everything?!

"Channel 3" hasn't really existed since analog TV broadcasting has been phasing out. Most TVs built in the last 10 years don't even have the circuitry to handle it.

However, is there an ATSC/DVB-T "RF Modulator" available? I don't know if FCC (or their non-US equivalents) allow unlicenced low power transmission that can be picked up by a modern TV.

My dream machine when I was young:

-CPU: two MC68000 cpus, at least at 8 MHz.

-Audio: Z80 sound processor, 1 MB sound memory, Yamaha sound co-processor, 8 channels of stereo sound at 24 KHz.

-Video: 320x240 to 1280x960, 2/4/8/16-bit color, hardware 3d vector and texturing unit, up to 4096 triangles per frame at 60 frames per second.

-Memory: at least 16 MB RAM.

Storage: floppy/cd/scsi hard disk.

-O/S: Amiga-like UI, unix-like under the hood, multitasking, multiuser.

Standard peripherals: keyboard, 3-button mouse, 8-button joystick (2 ports).

Programming: C-like language with enhanced type system, additional functional and object-oriented features. Actually, I didn't know about this stuff then, so it's a recent addition :-).

Games: ports of every arcade game up to 1995 :-)... of course, anything else is welcomed :-).

The RF transmitter is probably why battery life is limited to five minutes

You know some old computers actually did have an RF transmitter, but for audio not video. My Atari STFM had one, but to this day I still can't find any documentation on that feature (no it was not a dream :D ), maybe they were also trying to evade the FCC.

My dream computer is a GSV Culture Mind asking me if I want to join it exploring the galaxy and then the universe beyond with all my family and friends. And then I wake up with hope.

Yeah my dream computer is me turning into a Mind

My dream computer was a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 w/ a Wacom stylus which I carried everywhere (along w/ a spare battery), and I had docking stations for it at home, and at work, along w/ power supplies, so that I just dropped it in place and used it w/ an external keyboard and mouse. When mobile, it had a transflective display which allowed me to use it in full, bright, direct sunlight, so I used it as an ebook reader, and map reader (w/ a USB GPS).

I despair of replacing it --- these days I have:

- a Samsung Galaxy Book 12 --- very nice machine, but the OLED washes out in bright sunlight, and I have to keep the drive full so that it won't update beyond Windows 10 build 1703 (Fall Creators Update breaks the stylus so that it won't select text, or draw in older apps such as Freehand)

- Galaxy Note 10+ --- wonderfully portable, I carry it places that the Fujitsu never would have gone, but again, the display doesn't work in the sun

- Kindle Scribe --- screen works great in sunlight, and it uses the same stylus technology as my other devices, so excellent synergy, but loading maps is a pain, and there's no GPS

- a Wacom One connected to my MacBook at my desk

I desperately want a computer which:

- has a daylight viewable display (this idea that one can out-bright the sun on a battery-powered device is just idiocy)

- has a nice stylus (Wacom EMR, the current generation is fine --- I suppose my next computer will be a Wacom Cintiq Companion, but that will use a different stylus technology than everything else)

- converts between tablet and laptop and desktop use -- I'll pay for a docking station if offered, or use one of the USB-C ones

It is literally a dream computer.

My dream machine was a room. There was a keyboard/display terminal, but also the program listing was shown (in that band-printer green/white perforated paper style) scrolled the floor where I could do a code walkthrough. There were also 3D pixelated models made in Lego fashion, one of which was a friend of mind Bill in half-scale. It wasn't apparent whether these things were physically implemented or VR--it was indistinguishable. I think I was walking around, either thinking about how to build something or debugging. Chances are that I was working on something that I'd left unsolved during the day that I considered challenging. I had this dream while I was in engineering in the mid-80s.

My dream is a modern CPU with UEFI/CSM, and a motherboard that has no built-in chipset but instead gives me a serial port, a ps/2 port, memory slots, and expansion ports on an eATX form factor. I can bring my own everything else. Given how many PCIe lanes that modern CPUs have, this should be doable. Then when the disk controller dies, I can just plop a new one in without messing around with surface mount components...

I very rarely remember any of my dreams, I usually just wake up with no memory of even having dreamt.

I often wonder if I'm missing out on any gems like this.

I'm kind of jealous that this wasn't my dream. I love dreams like this.

Wow, transmitting to the screen through RF instead of wires. That's rare!

Marketers these days would spin that as a "wireless monitor"

God I love those old Tandy laptops. First computer I ever touched. Noticed it has two floppy drive readers? There's one to boot the OS from, and the other is for your data :) (no hard drive !)

Back in the day, it was the "Power Amiga".

Today, it'd be a RISC-V based machine that's 100% open hardware throughout.

And it would run a multi-server OS based on seL4 microkernel.

You can't get to a shell and dd when booted in a Linux installer?

I remember a relative having an early model laptop from Japan. It had a 386 processor I think and a monochrome screen. The keyboard sounded so sublime. I want one so bad lol

Wow imagine that, the ability to wirelessly display video. Decades later and we can’t even do that today reliably, easily or cheaply.

Great jorb on this post. Have a trophy!

I loved the bit about the channel-3 wireless display transmission: historical fiction at its finest.

This would work great in comic form too! Lovely little story

Wow, this caught me by surprise. Love the little details.

Funny! A 486 in 2011 was a bit ... weird, however ;-)

I was sort of on the fence as to whether it was real until the end... I mean you could feasibly make a short run 486 machine today if you wanted to without too much effort (depending on how hard you are willing to try could do SB emulator, FPGA, or the real thing) and stick it in a chonky case, in fact the case and the keyboard would probably be the most expensive parts. But it would probably be a one person super short run labour of love kind of project, and there's not a huge number of people out there who would necessarily appreciate it.

Who knows, maybe this is where the dream turns into reality :D

486 maybe, but PC compatible ?

This is lovely thank you for sharing!

Loved the writing <3

While throwing out old storage boxes this weekend, I discovered my old Power Macintosh 6100, packed up in 1997. To use eBay terminology, it was in vintage condition. It had the mouse, keyboard, VGA monitor adapter, power cord, and a few floppy disks. There was no excuse not to plug it in and see what happened.

So that's what I did. The chimes played and the smiling Mac appeared on the screen. The clock battery had died, but otherwise it was working like the day I'd last shut it off. My work was all there in Nisus Writer and ClarisWorks formats, patiently waiting 13 years for me to resume. On one of the unlabeled 3.5-inch floppy disks was a series of .DSK files. Those files were images of 5.25-inch Apple ][ diskettes. I downloaded an Apple ][ emulator and was soon running the Applesoft BASIC and 6502 assembly programs I'd written when I got my first computer at age 10.

I have a recurring dream where I'm in a house where I lived long ago. It's just as if it had remained abandoned since the day I left; it's dark and filled with cobwebs, but otherwise the furniture is still there. These dreams always have the effect of compressing time. I remember old situations so vividly and freshly that my mind thinks hardly any time has passed. Exploring this old Macintosh and Apple ][ was the same experience, but without the cobwebs, because digital files don't age. My programs from decades ago ran just as well as they did back then.

The time-compression effect was as strong as the files were perfect. It transported me to the room where my family kept the Apple. I felt the pattern of the carpet and the texture of the walls. I smelled the slightly musty air. I felt the resistance of the door and the momentary change in air pressure as I opened it. I was ten years old again. Woz hadn't yet crashed his plane, Steve Jobs hadn't yet met John Sculley, and Microsoft wasn't yet the enemy because they didn't sell operating systems.

It's tempting to dive deeper. There are "Classic" Mac websites. Apple ][ fan clubs are still going strong. eBay stands ready to help me complete my retro hardware collection. But I wouldn't really be reliving old memories; I'd be replacing them with new ones. Today, if I close my eyes and think hard, I can still evoke the sensation of pure wonder I felt when, as a child, I first ran Bob Bishop's magical "APPLE VISION" program. But I'm sure I could replace that memory with a jaded "my, how far we've come" chuckle if I loaded up the dancing man in the TV set today.

I chose to keep my memories, not make new ones. I copied my old personal files to a fileserver, then wiped the Macintosh's hard drive and packaged it up to sell on eBay. The hardware is gone, and only the software remains.

Originally written in 2010 for my defunct blog.

Hi, it's me, your dream psychologist.

Linux represents business, homogeneity, AWS, Google, webscale. The H*R games represent the fun and wonder of the Internet in the early 2000s.

We, as a civilization, are installing Linux and wiping our H*R installation. You're conflicted about this. It feels like there should be a place for the H*R install too, but where will the money come from?

I like Linux.

Imagine telling a Linux user in 1997 or so "Linux represents business, homogeneity". They'd laugh you out of town.

The warning signs were there in about 1999, when suits and marketroids, rather than hackers, became the dominant force at large Linux conferences.

well... that and mentioning Linux helped boost those manic stock prices.

> Linux represents business, homogeneity, AWS, Google, webscale

That's what Linux represents to you? To me it represents transparency of software, the fact that I can look at my machine and understand everything that it's doing, because all of the secret sauce is easily available for me to see. If it weren't for OSS, I wouldn't have realized that everything is ultimately knowable, no matter how advanced it seems, and that everything was built by some person like me, not handed down to humanity by a remote god.

Basically, the exact opposite of what you say.

To be honest, it represents that to me too... it's just not the facet of Linux that occurred to me when I thought about OP's dream.

I think that comment was calling for a "yes, and..." response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes,_and...

> the fact that I can look at my machine and understand everything that it's doing

They are working on it. An ugly config window on xsnow with Material design style graphics. What is wrong with those people ? /s

I was struck by the sentence where a clearly talented coder (based on the website) said something like, "I couldn't afford $450".

Perusing the website further exposed the tragedy. Some brilliant people can't live like the normies. They could learn, though, if they wanted to.

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