The Sinclair QL Forum

There is/was an http viewer for the expanded QL a while back. It was text only though. So, no smileys. And, no https either back then.

The http viewer was written in C68 if I remember correctly. But it was a bit on the slow side, even with a Gold Card. It also operated on top of a "non-standard" windowing system.

The forum is PHP, so that would be another requirement to consider, or something along those lines.

If the goverment has backdoors at the ISP level, a Raspberry Pi isn't going to get around those, unless, using TOR, and even then....

EDIT: then you need some manner of storage for every forum's every thread and every message. Plus users -- I would be thinking of a decent back-end database here, and Archive wouldn't cut it.

I wonder if SuperBASIC would be a good development language to build this system.


Cheers,
Norm.

Brane2 wrote:Ofcourse, by QL I don't mean original one.
Sure, such can't machine probably wouldn't do ssh en/decrytpon for https, but might do everything else.

Windows came on 7 floppies for a 33 MHz processor with 640K Ram and worked fine on the internet. It also works as fast if not faster than all my newer computers for normal use. Clearly inefficient software is the problem written by people that have no connection with the real world and the hardware. A classic example is a software engineer thought by increasing the number of sectors on a disk he could get more storage for his program. Windows has gone from 7 MBytes to Windows 10 at 7 GBytes with no change as far as the average user is concerned.

I think you'd need to define what an 'average' user is.

I've used Windows since it was the text windows version - and it has come a long long way since. The latest Windows 10 offering I used on my works desktop allows me to run a Linux shell and use apt-get to install Linux features - ok - I am not an average user - but who/what is?

I agree there has been bloat - but people like to be surrounded by comfort and ease of use - and much of the enhancements over the years have been honing that.

Pr0f wrote:I think you'd need to define what an 'average' user is.

I suppose the average computer user today I refer to use tablets and phones now.

Pr0f wrote:I agree there has been bloat - but people like to be surrounded by comfort and ease of use - and much of the enhancements over the years have been honing that.

I can understand adding a cushion or two to sit comfortably on a sofa but 1,000,000 times more code, 125000 times more RAM and 50,000,000 more hard disk space is millions of cushions. It is obscene and ridiculous to me but that is just my opinion. I can't imagine QL software running at 1GHz if it was designed to do so but would like to see it.

One driving factor is resource hungry media and the platforms that host them (browsers).

Ruptor wrote:

Brane2 wrote:Ofcourse, by QL I don't mean original one.
Sure, such can't machine probably wouldn't do ssh en/decrytpon for https, but might do everything else.

Windows came on 7 floppies for a 33 MHz processor with 640K Ram and worked fine on the internet.

Back when the Internet meant a 56kBit modem at most and thus web-pages were small and entirely unencrypted... the load of the encryption alone can be a bit much for slow processors unless it's done by an external faster I/O processor or whatever.

Which one is Dilwyn? At least they didn't need encryption.

Ruptor wrote:Which one is Dilwyn? At least they didn't need encryption.