LLM dren also isn't going to provide anything on how wildly different the home computer revolution would have been with twice as big character ROMs; the personal computer revolution would have been with twice as big code pages 437, 850, and 1252 and an extra CGA attribute bit; the BBS era would have been with 9N1 telecommunications; ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 would have been with space for the C1 control characters with no need for alternative forms; ASCII and EBCDIC would have been without need for the national variants and room for some accented characters; and even how different the 6502 instruction set would have been.

With so many huge changes like those the alternate history by today would be far diverged from this universe.

The knock-on effect of EBCDIC having room for accented characters would have been the U.S.A. not changing a lot of placenames when the federal government made the GNIS in the 1970s and 1980s, for example. MS-DOS might have ended up with a 255-character command-tail limit, meaning that possibly some historically important people would never have been motivated to learn the response file form of the Microsoft LINK command. People would not have hit a 256-character limit on path lengths on DOS+Windows.

Teletext would never have needed national variants, would have had different graphics, would have needed a higher bitrate, might have lasted longer, and people in the U.K. would have possibly never seen that dog on 4-Tel. Octal would have been more convenient than hexadecimal, and a lot of hexadecimal programming puns would never have been made. C-style programming languages might have had more punctuation to use for operators.

Ð or Ç could have been MS-DOS drive letters. Microsoft could have spelled its name with other characters, and we could all be today reminiscing about µs-dos. The ZX Spectrum could have been more like the Oric. The FAT12 filesystem format would never have happened. dBase 2 files would have had bigger fields. People could have put more things on their PATHs in DOS, and some historically important person would perhaps have never needed to learn how to write .BAT files and gone on to a career in computing.

The Domain Name System would have had a significantly different history, with longer label limits, more characters, and possibly case sensitivity if non-English letters with quirky capitalization rules had been common in SBCS in 1981. EDNS0 might never have happened or been wildly different. RGB 5-6-5 encoding would never have happened; and "true colour" might have ended up as a 12-12-12 format with nothing to spare for an alpha channel. 81-bit or 72-bit IEEE 754 floating point might have happened.

"Multimedia" and "Internet" keyboards would not have bumped up against a limit of 127 key scancodes, and there are a couple of luminaries known for explaining the gynmastics of PS/2 scancodes who would have not had to devote so much of their time to that, and possibly might not have ended up as luminaries at all. Bugs in several famous pieces of software that occurred after 49.7 days would have either occurred much sooner or much later.

Actual intelligence is needed for this sort of science fiction alternative history construction.

Guess we should count our blessings that 7-bit bytes didn't become the de facto standard. Given that 7 bits is sufficient for ASCII and BCD, and the popularity of the IBM 1401 in the 1960's, that's not at all implausible. The alternate history might have had only 2^28 (268,435,456) unique IP4s. The cynic in me wants you to be sure to include the inevitable "We'd be better of with 10-bit bytes" headline in the 9-bit alternate history.

I've always taken it as a given that we ended up with 8-bits bytes because its the smallest power-of-two number of bits that accommodates ASCII and packed BCD. Back in the day, BCD mattered rather a lot. x86 has legacy BCD instructions, for example.

Author here. Really great comment; I've linked it from the OP. (Could do without the insults!) Most of the changes you point out sound... good? Maybe having fewer arbitrary limits would have sapped a few historically significant coders of their rage against the machine, but maybe it would have pulled in a few more people by being less annoying in general. On colors, I did mention that in the post but losing an alpha channel would be painful.

> The knock-on effect of EBCDIC having room for accented characters would have been the U.S.A. not changing a lot of placenames when the federal government made the GNIS in the 1970s and 1980s, for example.

I don't know about that, it had room for lots of accented characters with code pages. If that went unused, it probably would have also gone unused in the 9 bit version.

> Actual intelligence is needed for this sort of science fiction alternative history construction.

Why? We're basically making a trivia quiz, that benefits memorization far more than intelligence. And you actively don't want to get into the weeds of chaos-theory consequences or you forget the article you're writing.

That's an interesting argument about convenience discouraging interaction with the system. If everything just works, there's no need to tinker. If you stop tinkering, the world might miss out on some real magic.

I'm curious what would have happened with gaming.. would we have gotten the NES?

I didn't recognise the word 'dren'. Asked an LLM.