I'm curious how compelling my hardware-Internet Communicator hypothetical is!
So: Given the opportunity to implement TCP/IP, HTML/CSS, (not JS, makes the hypothetical less interesting), Gemini, XMPP, eMail JPEG, PNG, WOFF, Xiph media, DVI, USB, etc from scratch on a novel string-centric CPU (with a couple coprocessors) designed specifically for it... Would you be interested?
Respond to expand on what interests you, or if there's an alternate computer architecture which interests you more.
If you were in the market for a new computer, would a one with an OS focused on energy-efficient web browsing & internet messaging appeal? It'd barely have a concept of "apps", & certainly wouldn't support any existing ones. In your choice of form factor.
It'd be re-programmable directly on-device, if you're willing to learn its weird CPU/OS/languages.
Follow-up polls from last week: You've been recruited to reimplement a web browser & internet communicator from (nearly) scratch, hardware on up! Choose (only) 1 job!
This will be split across multiple polls. I prefer if you only vote in one.
You've all chosen your jobs in the fantasy of rebuilding computing from near-scratch (save say for networking, etc standards). A fantasy I'm really enjoying exploring!
The most popular jobs in my list by far was dev tooling! I'll explore my solutions here in my next metathread...
Other popular jobs (>4 votes) were:
Networking (TCP/IP/TLS & alternatives)
Page Layout (I was specifically thinking block layout)
Interactivity (interpreting user input)
(addendum)
O.K., another couple(?) poll relating to my hypothetical: I've described a few processors which would work together to let you read & edit multilingual documents!
Which is the most interesting? Which would you most enjoy programming?
(a) does the bulk of processing with occasional aid of (b).
(c) Handles speech-to-text, machine language, text prediction, etc.
(d) Handles retraining (c), signal analysis, & asymmetric crypto.
O.K., another couple polls relating to my hypothetical: I've described a few processors which would work together to let you read & edit multilingual documents!
Which is the most interesting? Which would you most enjoy programming?
Is the GPU I designed for visual browsers more interesting?
What prior art did I base my hypothetical hardware on, upon which I enjoy rethinking computing?
That barebones 16bit RISC "Arithmetic Core" (most popular in the poll) resembles early home computer CPUs, & and these built by hobbyists. It has more latches (nearly replacing a control unit), so maybe more a 1990-era machine.
The "Parsing & Output Units" don't have prior art to my knowledge, but I wanted to get away from the maths focus! It'd probably make the coprocessors more fun to program.
1/2
My "FPMA" is basically a simplified "FPGA" to fill gaps in realtime signal analysis & cryptography. Then I asked myself: How I'd want to program it?
The (unpopular, in poll) neural net accelerator I described is an actual chip manufactured by Mythic. Neat design... https://mythic.ai/
The (fairly popular in poll) "Layout Coprocessor" is a variant of modern GPU designs. For browser needs I removed the cache hierarchy & added tree traversals.
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