• @rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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    14 months ago

    Apparently nobody understood in which context this was said.

    I meant a Star Wars Expanded Universe-like or solarpunk-like or some other imagined future (but with that element of utopia) world where computers are produced as widely as screwdrivers, are more modular and interoperable and competencies are also more widespread, and where computing is radically simpler due to these two requirements. Because you can’t have TSMC fabs everywhere.

    USB is by far too complex a protocol for this when you don’t necessarily need it.

    Also many motherboards still have PS/2 , no significant performance impacts, you might have mixed something up. Anyway, from a computer mouse you don’t need much.

    • KillingTimeItself
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      4 months ago

      Also many motherboards still have PS/2

      it’s mostly a legacy thing, either industry boards which are used with windows 95, or boards that just include PS2 because, features™

      no significant performance impacts

      well, part of the problem is that in order to handle mouse inputs, the PS2 calls an interrupt which stops the entire cpu and forces it to focus on the user input, until it kills it likely over a cycle count metric, and then returns back to what it was doing, though perhaps this was back in the day when interrupts were more common, i wouldn’t be surprised if modern PS2 is just conversion into USB lmao.

      you can argue that USB is complex, and it’s not all that complex, it’s just serialized data transmission, the benefit of it’s “complexity” being the massively increased transmission bandwidth compared to something like serial, which is like 32kb/s historically.

      • @rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        14 months ago

        Yes, I know. I should clarify that all this was in the context of some imagined future sustainable computing with decentralized production and a bit of luddism.

        As in “how would we live in spacefaring future if the PCs we could have were all comparable to Amiga 500”.

        • KillingTimeItself
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          14 months ago

          that’s definitely an interesting thought, i would figure it’s probably the most primitive source of communication, I.E. directly managed serial, or probably ethernet, which has an extremely broad range of applications, and standards, from anything from coaxial cables and ring networks, to twisted pair serialized transmission and switched tree networks.