For me the interesting alternate reality is where CPUs got stuck in the 200-400mhz range for speed, but somehow continued to become more efficient.

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.

I remember using the web on 25mhz computers. It ran about as fast as it does today with a couple ghz. Our internet was a lot slower than as well.

Apart from transputers mentioned already, there’s https://greenarrays.com/home/documents/g144apps.php

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

I don't think there's really a credible alternate reality where Moore's law just stops like that when it was in full swing.

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.

> One thing I do know for sure. LLMs would have been impossible.

Maybe they could, as ASICs in some laboratories :)

We did have web browsers, I had Internet Explorer on Windows 3.1, 33mhz 8mb RAM.

Transputers. Lots and lots and lots of transputers. (-:

There are web browsers for 8-bits today, and there were web browsers for e.g. Amiga's with 68000 CPU's from 1979 back in the day.

And imagine if telecom had topped out around ISDN somewhere, with perhaps OC-3 (155Mbps) for the bleeding-fastest network core links.

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.

> Would we still get web browsers?

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

Well, we wouldn't have ads and tracking.

Crazy for wanting a computer that's actually yours.

I believe there will come a day where people who can do this will be selling these on the black market for top dollar.

I implemented "multitasking" (well, two-tasking) between a BASIC program and native code on a Z80, using a "supervisor" driven by hardware interrupts. There's just so much you can pack in a 4MHz CPU with a 4-bit ALU (yes, not 8-bit). It worked for soft-realtime tasks, but would be a rather weak desktop.