Sufficiently young people probably suspect these were called netbooks as some joke. They run Emacs just fine and without constantly swapping, but a web browser?
If not, they can’t even run JavaScript ads, because apparently ads like to refresh the screen with a static image at 60fps. Software rasterizers can’t keep up with that (even on 32 core, >200W TDP xeons, from what I’ve seen...)
The web really sucks at everything other than network effects.
Hardware acceleration makes things slower, not faster.
> Software rasterizers can’t keep up with that (even on 32 core, >200W TDP xeons, from what I’ve seen...)
You're nuts. Software rasterizers keep up with DOS games just fine, even on an old 386.
It's the fact that they're trying to use Javascript and other garbage-collected or object-oriented languages to code these rasterizers.
X was the solution to the problem MIT had, and as such, the problem X was trying to solve. It worked very, very well for what it was trying to solve.
How we ended up with billions of people able to interact with an app that we can all build at home seems insane...
Java. Java did this. On billions of devices! Everywhere from your smart card to the mainframe. Before Java, Dis! Before Dis, Forth! Good luck running a web browser plus your application on a smart card, or even (decently) on an underpowered netbook.