Collapse OS

NeXTSTEP basically became MacOSX when Apple merged MacOS with it.

AROS is the next best OS to use as it has a low memory footprint and can run on X86 systems: http://aros.sourceforge.net/

If you want Windows try ReactOS: https://reactos.org/

OS/2 try OSFree: http://osfree.org/

BeOS try HaikuOS: https://www.haiku-os.org/

All are low memory OSes.

How was this not built to be waterproof?!

The TRS-80 was... not built for ruggedness and durability. At least not if you had a system with any peripherals; the cables were notoriously flaky, to the point that the problems are on record in the Wikipedia page, as an explanation for the "Trash-80" sobriquet. (I recall at the time seeing aftermarket recommendations for expensive cables and doing things like wrapping components in tinfoil to try to get some extra RF shielding.)

To me a much more interesting avenue to be able to “bootstrap the pc era” would be to achieve DIY knowledge enough to recreate TTL on a garage. Afterwards you can at least create a computer from the 80s, as Ben Eater is doing in his youtube channel.

> this prepper BS is just fantasy driven by a hyper-apocalyptic news cycle shlepping around clickbait

Au contraire, it’s the belief that our system can continue like it’s doing that is the real hyperbole. Collapse is just baseline reality of civilizations.

- HISTORY: Collapse is a property of every civilization we’ve studied. These people were as smart if not smarter than us, working with societies smaller and simpler than ours.

- ECONOMY: The way money is created and managed today is an ongoing experiment that almost ended in 2008, and we are still on uncharted ground. We can only continue paying for debt by increasing consumption in the following year, yet our debt keeps increasing, by the ever-devaluation of our currency, requiring more production and consumption. No one is planning on an end to this model of growth.

- TECH: Most of our infrastructure is built under the incentive of increased efficiency and profit, not long-term robustness since profit has to be sacrificed to plan for contingencies like price fluctuations in supply. Short term tech outcompetes the long term, easy. Strong but fragile. And then there’s the incentivized inefficiencies from economies of scale: one calorie of food now requires ten calories of energy from our system to produce.

- COMPLEXITY: “More is different.” As everything becomes interconnected, things become entrenched into dynamics that become increasingly difficult to control and even reason about. Rational decision-making must always be filtered by the interests of the current system, thus there is a loss in agency in what we can do (read: incentives), and we are stuck trying to find creative solutions that must accept the framework of what may be a harmful system, often just making that system more effectively harmful.

- ENVIRONMENT: Some call it the sixth mass extinction. Whatever it is, the biosphere is changing dramatically. Soil is in a weird zombie state kept alive by oil. The basic line is that the value of life is diminished through the lens of our economy, as dead resources. So our model will continue bringing the real world into consistency with that deadness.

- MYTHS: When we live in a civilization that sanctifies all forms of advancement and improvement and growth, there is no fertile soil for the acceptance of limitation. We only have the vocabulary to label it pessimist. Thus, optimism becomes co-opted for the aspirations of a mythical techno-utopia beyond all conceivable boundary.