121–130 of 323 posts
In the event of a sufficiently large collapse, people will be so far down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs that an OS will be about the last thing on their minds.
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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.…
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My novel idea (feel free to use it!) is about someone taking a 1980s computer back to the Second World War. It's used by the Allies to decrypt Ultra intelligence and is treated like a kind of holy relic - only a tiny set of "high priests" are allowed near it, fewer still can touch it, and because of its importance they go to extraordinary lengths to ensure it can never be damaged by anything from bombs to power glitc…
Yeah, no. I've handled parts of Whirlwind[1], a vacuum tube machine from just post-WWII, and the gap from that to a C-64 or any other circa-1980 machine is just too great. They were using discrete wiring, resistors and wires soldered to the bases of the vacuum tubes. The Whirlwind was the first machine to use core memory, and the 4K core memory unit is a box about the size of a phone booth. I don't know if PCBs exist…
The primary design requirement for a stand alone computer system in a post-* world is simplicity, maintainability, and debugability. It must be possible for a single user to do _everything_ in situ. There are very few existing systems that meet all three of these criteria across the whole hardward-firmware-software stack, and modern technology companies are actively moving away from this.
At all levels this requires extensive and open documentation and implementations, and ideally a real standard.
The hardware level would probably need a complete rethink, and if you want good peripheral support (e.g. to be able to try to access whatever data device you come across) then you need a solution that doesn't require a subsystem kernel maintainer for everything, or you just give up on that. A potential 4th requirement here could be a large supply of parts since in most scenarios it is extremely unlikely that anyone will be able to get a fab working again for hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe radiation hardened large feature size ICs or something like that. The alternative would be a zillion RPis (with some alternate data storage interface) so that hopefully some of them survive and continue to work after 100s of years, but this seems like a much riskier bet than trying to actually engineer something to survive for a very long time. Above the IC level the ability for someone to replace parts without special tooling beyond maybe a soldering iron also seems like it is probably also important.
At the software level there are two existing systems that might serve, one of the Smalltalks, or one of the lisps (my bias says common lisp, despite the warts). Assembly and C are just not a big enough lever for a single individual, and other things like Java seem to have been intentionally engineered to deprive individual users of power. The objective here is not to be fast, the objective is to retain access to computation at all so that the knowledge of how to work with such systems is not lost. Also at the software level the requirements pretty much preclude things like browsers that are so monstrously complex that there no hope than an individual could ever hope to maintain a legacy artifact (or probably even compile one of the monsters) for interpreting modern web documents.
I do not think that we can expect the current incentive structure around software and hardware to accidentally create something that can meet these requirements. If anything it is going in the other direction as large corporations can employ technology that can _only_ be maintained by large engineering teams. We are putting little computers in everything, but they are useless to anyone in a world without a network.
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What on earth are you going to do with a pocket botnet? Without some kind of USB-OTG adaptor to break it out into useful GPIO for interfacing with other machinery, its going to be limited to playing flappy bird and failing to send telemetry over the now-destroyed mobile network.
A modern android cell phone has a camera, screen, light, keyboard, speakers, battery, and a cpu that is many times faster than the z80 counterpart and all the software to go with it. There are also various short range communication and mesh networking abilities (NFC /Bluetooth/WIFI). Its not too difficult to create a wifi router out of a phone. You can purchase many USB to GPIO boards cheaply online (as a pepper your…
Why does the author think the global supply chain will collapse in the next ten years? What scenario do they envision? Climate change? Will cost trillions of dollars and billions of lives, but will likely be played out over course of several decades. We will be stressing out about it but its not going to be electronics-ending apocalyptic Nuclear war? Please. The countries that have the capability are also level-heade…
Big solar flare. Grid goes down. Could take years to get it back up. https://www.cnet.com/news/we-arent-ready-for-a-solar-storm-s... Near miss in July 2012: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...
Also, while I think a big solar flare would break a lot of stuff--- I think we're better prepared for it than many give us credit for. Tens of millions of people might be initially without power; some fraction of them may need to wait for a long time (months or even years) to get it back; and various bits of transport and production may get disrupted. Enough to require rationing and a major pain to quality of life, but not enough for any kind of catastrophic chain reaction, IMO.
I love projects like these. One that has me fascinated is the idea of building a computer than can last centuries. Can it be done? - Will the ICs last that long, can they? - How will it get electricity if the sockets and voltage standards change? - How do you make it durable to dropping, water, dust, etc? - What sort of writable storage can last that long without degrading? - How do you edit fonts as language changes…
1. Yes; 10C reduction in temperature means doubling of life. I've known pentiums to last 10 years at 60C+; just running processors at 30*C instead is 80 years minimum. Main thing is to use leaded solder so you don't get electromigration problems.
2. Solar panels and batteries. Battery voltage is chemical and fixed by physics; nickel-iron batteries can be rebuilt and last forever. Solar panels can be oversized to provide enough energy even when they degrade over time and/or the computer can just be used at a lower duty cycle.
3. Make it big and hard to move in a sturdy box.
4. Flash can last that long if it is periodically rewritten, kept cool, has redundancy, and isn't updated often.
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…