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Collapse OS

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Re: Collapse OS

#111

Post by rapind »

bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #54

I don't think just developing a Z80 operating system is enough. The whole ecosystem needs to be preserved. In agriculture, we have the doomsday seed vault [0] just for this purpose. If we anticipate collapse of the current economic system or society, I think we should build a doomsday computer vault, that keeps everything we need to rebuild the computing industry in a underground bunker. It keeps everything we need i…

I'd like to see a log being kept in orbit. Like every 10 years it's rotated (FIFO, oldest comes down, new one is launched) with a large delta so that it might survive our current civilization in case of global / climate craziness.

Re: Collapse OS

#112

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tiborsaas wrote: post #39

Anyone wondering why the Z80 chip, just read the FAQ: https://collapseos.org/why.html "The z80 has 9000 transistors. 9000! Compared to the millions we have in any modern CPU, that's nothing!"

No, it's 9000. That's not nothing. You may be able to scavenge old ones for a long time, but building new ones will be non-trivial.

Re: Collapse OS

#113

Post by pankajdoharey »

bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #54

I don't think just developing a Z80 operating system is enough. The whole ecosystem needs to be preserved. In agriculture, we have the doomsday seed vault [0] just for this purpose. If we anticipate collapse of the current economic system or society, I think we should build a doomsday computer vault, that keeps everything we need to rebuild the computing industry in a underground bunker. It keeps everything we need i…

dont we have many programs on archieve org

Re: Collapse OS

#114

Post by yellowapple »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #43
xmprt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that possible in this fictional reality but stockpiling an RPi isn't?

There are vastly more Z80's in circulation that Raspberry Pis.

Also, in a worse-case scenario, it's much easier to build a Z80 by hand from individual transistors and/or logic gates¹ (which would still be absurdly difficult, but not impossible) than any ARM CPU (including the ones in any generation of RPi). In a slightly-less-than-worse-case scenario, it's much easier to build a Z80-based computer by hand (i.e. with a Z80 you pulled off some other piece of hardware) than your average ARM-based computer (including any RPi).

¹ "logic gates" not necessarily being transistor-based, either; one could take a cue from the guy building a 32-bit RISC-V machine with vacuum tubes: https://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/vtc/

Re: Collapse OS

#115

Post by _xnmw »

mschaef wrote: post #77
yellowapple wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that modern society - and the current size of the world's population - is dependent on a lot of programmable devices. For example: agriculture, where tractors and other farm machines nowadays have ECUs/ECMs (let alone even more programmable bits and pieces). Same for the vehicles used to actually transport food from farms to the rest of the world. There are plenty of other examples, too, like medical d…

> the current size of the world's population - is dependent on a lot of programmable devices. Not to mention the energy supply chain. If the supply chain required to make electronics collapses, that probably also means the energy supply chain has collapsed, or has at least been severely disrupted. That seems far more likely to be damaging and far more quickly that a lack of ability to keep a microcontroller running.…

Electricity generation does not require a global supply chain. Modern computer manufacturing does.

Re: Collapse OS

#116

Post by yellowapple »

hybrids wrote: post #97

Why z80 and not x86 or AArch, which are both more readily accessible today? This whole idea reeks of someone trying to reconcile their love of old computers with their poorly considered death-cult Malthusianism.

Z80 chips are way more common than even x86, by merit of them having proliferated in embedded microcontrollers.

Re: Collapse OS

#117

Post by AtlasBarfed »

I think some sort or retro low-performance OS should start with NeXTSTEP.

Ryzen processors have 80MB of L3 cache! IIRC that may have been twice what was needed to run the colorized versions of NeXT.

A lot of "man the old days were all we needed" recollections of Windows and DOS forget how crappy those OSes were...

But NeXT? That was basically a modern OS, with a bit less anti-aliasing. XWindow systems STILL look horrible compared to it.

It fits in L3 cache. 5-10 NEXT hard disks fit in RAM!

It had a web 1.0 browser, TCPIP networking, all the productivity apps. It had DOOM.

Sure Mach the microkernel was buggy and leaked memory, but kernels... there's lots of kernels now.

I think it would be a great project to start with the NextOS and carefully rebuild it up with good security and multitasking.

It would be fun to run NeXTSTEP on bare metal with RAMdisks (spare a processor to do the writes to SSD), and compare with other systems, see if it feels ludicrously fast or not.

Re: Collapse OS

#118

Post by undersuit »

bcaa7f3a8bbc wrote: post #54

I don't think just developing a Z80 operating system is enough. The whole ecosystem needs to be preserved. In agriculture, we have the doomsday seed vault [0] just for this purpose. If we anticipate collapse of the current economic system or society, I think we should build a doomsday computer vault, that keeps everything we need to rebuild the computing industry in a underground bunker. It keeps everything we need i…

https://www.opensourceecology.org/

This website got posted to HN in the past, definitely something that should be part of the attempt.

Re: Collapse OS

#119

Post by AtlasBarfed »

PeterisP wrote: post #36
SwellJoe wrote: post #26

I've been sort of half-assed working on a novel about a post-tech future (100+ years after apocalypse), where a handful of people retained some technology by virtue of having stored information about it in a manner that survived and a tradition of scavenging and trading and a sort of religion based on maintaining it in a working state. So, this is a fun read and thought experiment, even if an 8-bit computer is probab…

IMHO you could be using the same chips for a surprisingly long time - you're likely to need some electronics maintained e.g. replacing capacitors, but if you really need to get some computing power for a 2100 post-apocalyptic scenario where there's just a few million people, then scavenging working chips from random gadgets has a lot of potential. E.g. a hard drive controller or a kids toy may be running on something…

Raspberry Pi is 4 gigahertz. Madness! You're in a postapocalyptic world and you find someone's drawer of raspberry pi sideprojects: a solar panel, a low power screen...

... you find a controller ... you find their emulation raspberry pi. ... all of a sudden, the world isn't as desolate.

Re: Collapse OS

#120

Post by AtlasBarfed »

blfr wrote: post #4
frabert wrote: post #2

So, let me see if I understand this correctly: this is supposed to run on z80-based computers after an armageddon comes and all the other "modern" computers are out of business, so people start building them by scavenging parts. Ok. So, first of all, how are you supposed to download this thing onto your homebrew computer, given that internet will most likely be down? "But if the collapse magnitude is right, then this…

You're supposed to download it now and keep around. Just like preppers do with MREs and ammunition.

I said this further up the thread, but I'd rather have a raspberry pi, some screen cribbed from a smartphone, and some flash sticks.

Why plan for less than the raspberry pi level?

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