The computer built to last 50 years (2021)

The major problem I see with this is that while the computer itself might still boot, the world around it will have changed so radically it will effectively be useless.

You can see this with machines much younger than 50 years, they can't support the encryption required by most modern websites, interfaces age out of regular use: used a 24 pin parallel port lately? How about a modem?

Even software with long support for ancient machines eventually find it impossible to support older hardware, so you would be stuck with whatever the last release of software was available and likely any vendor would be long dead.

Machines don't age out because they stop working, they simply become obsolete to the surrounding environment. The article glosses over this problem by saying you could stick to simple use cases like email or word processing, but if you can't transfer the data off the machine, you are boned.

It does feel dangerous, somehow, doesn't it, to have the web of technology be so complex? Even something like an automobile- once cars were simple enough that you could take them apart, put them back together, and have a decent chance of doing it right. But now the parts and the computer controlled systems are so complex that you really can't. All the equipment that got left in Afghanistan is a case in point: the Afghan government could never use it, because it was too tightly tied into the whole US infrastructure and support network. Without the satellites and the special maintenance crews it was all useless. Whereas the Taliban had antique gear left over from the Soviet Union, and it was repairable, and it worked.

Joseph Tainter actually links this exact phenomenon to the collapse of civilizations. The theory is that every time a society reaches a crisis, they tend to solve it by making infrastructure and social systems more complex. But more complex means it needs more energy, more education, more expensive maintenance to run. Eventually things reach a tipping point where the social systems are so complicated that adding to the complexity actually makes things worse instead of better. At that point the high energy equilibrium point is unstable, and the system must shift down to a lower complexity equilibrium that requires less energy - oftentimes, much lower. This manifests as collapse. It would be fascinating if this desire that you see manifested often in popular culture for things to be simpler, less systematized (homesteading, anger at government and banks, calls for degrowth) was some kind of subconscious understanding that things were approaching just such a tipping point.

So I get the sentiment. At the same time, our devices are really only useful because of the networks of servers and the billion dollar chip fabs that make them. You can't have something like the modern internet without all that stuff. So I don't see this really working, at least in the short term. That said, you can do a lot of interesting stuff with a low powered machine, and I'd love to play around with one. It would probably run a unix shell just fine. Not sure about emacs though..

There is a small business near me that has a wool testing machine that absolutely relies on custom DOS 3.3 based software and an old school serial card. They have had to become very astute at picking up old parts to keep their old rigs running as the guy who wrote the control software passed on, and they don't want to invest money in rewriting it. You would think commodity hardware would run this setup but all attempts at shifting it have failed.

The problem with old electronics is that once the chips fall out of fashion, you are never getting replacement parts. Does anybody still manufacture DDR2 ram for example? Its just not that long ago it got replaced by DDR3 and DDR4 but in 10 short years if you need a couple of sticks of it, your only option is 2nd hand. The e-waste issue is very real and the relentless pace of change doesn't help, but I don't have a good answer for solving it.

The emulation scene is now so good this seems like a solved problem. KVM/QEMU are simply amazing.

Good point. Maybe this ForeverComputer could get a swappable component that does the connecting and encrypting? Kinda like you can SSH into a supercomputer from a Raspberry Pi and pretend your Pi itself has all that power.