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Re: Collapse OS

#161

Post by unixhero »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #117

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 horr…

Interesting idea. But okay, how? Could you scribble down a proof of concept Quemu configuration in order to achieve it? Also where to get Next compiled for AMD64?

Re: Collapse OS

#162

Post by undersuit »

rabidrat wrote: post #157
rapind wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would we get at the information if we don't have the technology to launch a rocket/spaceship to retrieve it?

Ham Radio.

Re: Collapse OS

#163

Post by JimmyAustin »

rabidrat wrote: post #157
rapind wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would we get at the information if we don't have the technology to launch a rocket/spaceship to retrieve it?

The satellites orbit would naturally decay to the point of reentry. I'm not sure of the engineering, but it might be possible to do a controlled descent to a specific place for survivors to rendezvous with.

Re: Collapse OS

#164

Post by vardump »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #117

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 horr…

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

How long will 7nm chips work before electromigration destroys them?

https://semiengineering.com/chip-aging-becomes-design-proble...

Re: Collapse OS

#165

Post by yellowapple »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #145
yellowapple wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-trivial is still better than outright impossible.

Well, the first transistor was in 1947. The Z80 was first manufactured in 1976. That's 29 years of improvements in manufacturing technology before the Z80 was manufacturable. So if we have to start over, the Z80 is sure better than the Pentium (or at least, we can make it first), but it's still outright impossible for quite a while.

It's possible to build CPUs with many times the Z80's transistor count by hand¹, albeit with great effort and taking up a heck of a lot of space (and probably nowhere near the speeds of a single-chip Z80).

¹ http://megaprocessor.com/index.html

Re: Collapse OS

#166

Post by MetalGuru »

maze-le wrote: post #136
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the pi might be needed for more demanding workloads (networks, routing, sdr radio system). With this solution you can build low-tech control systems and programmable switches with a bit of logic where a raspi would be overkill. But the doomsday scenarios aside, this is super useful as an educational device. It can teach people what computers actually are and how they operate on the lowest possible level.

This is what excites me about this project. Another commenter posted the NandToTetris course, which is along the same lines. Computers/software are so complicated now, so much understanding gets lost in the upper levels of abstraction. Everything just seems like black box magic.

Re: Collapse OS

#167

Post by flipgimble »

Related to the post, I highly recommend reading "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" [1] if you are interested in foundational technology that underpins our civilization. This type of information is often forgotten or taken for granted in our highly dependent late-capitalism society.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...

Re: Collapse OS

#169

Post by DiabloD3 »

rapind wrote: post #111
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.

Most likely the source of the end of the world is going to be the Sun throwing a X class solar flare at us and just frying everything in its path.

What you need is a super-deep immortal vault that isn't anywhere near any known fault lines, and who's ingress point is sufficiently above ground, and can be accessed safely if under water, and supplies its own electricity for thousands of years.

Everything outside of the facility will have to be electrically neural up to extreme voltages (due to the possibility of plasma storms arising that make the worst thunderstorms on Earth look like a nice day outside).

Re: Collapse OS

#170

Post by 7thaccount »

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 think about this all the time. A technology vault to take people from the water wheel to the Z80 would be smart. Expensive and I hope never needed, but there is a lot at risk.
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