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Collapse OS

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Re: Collapse OS

#221

Post by hyperion2010 »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #214
hyperion2010 wrote: post #124

Like other in this thread I have been thinking about this problem on and off for a while. I think that many of the comments stating that the Z80 is probably not the best choice are right (I know nothing about the Z80) and would like to extend some of their thinking. The primary design requirement for a stand alone computer system in a post-* world is simplicity, maintainability, and debugability. It must be possible…

What about Setun, a soviet ternary computer like in [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20080207064711/http://sovietcomp... [3] http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm It is a stack machine, it has somthing like FORTH. In which you can implement anything else, if you absolutely have to. Like some have done with another stack oriented system here: [4] https://en.wikipedia.or…

Will have to look over these more carefully, but your post reminded me that there is a potential 3rd candidate which is FORTH, but it seems like it might be just a bit too bare bones in some cases. Maybe with an accepted standard library or something it could work.

Re: Collapse OS

#223

Post by tuesdayrain »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #206

Best thing you and I can do to prevent climate change is to not have kids.

This is absurdly wrong. How about instead of trying to get some of the most educated people on the internet (who historically already have low birth rates) to stop reproducing even further, you instead redirect your efforts towards passing more climate-friendly regulations for corporations. That is the biggest source of climate change, not a niche group of people having some extra kids.

Re: Collapse OS

#224

Post by crpatino »

rwmj wrote: post #48
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…

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…

If I may recomend the book "Stars' Reach: A Novel of the Deindustrial Future" by one John Michael Greer, maybe we can see this idea from a different perspective.

From Greer's point of view, the factors that make today's hardware brittle are not technical, but economic. Corporations have to make electronics at a profit, and at a price point that is accesible to the average working class citizen. This business model would not be sustainable in the either a fast-collapse or slow-collapse scenario.

Instead, in the novel, governments take over the tech industry sometime in the second half of the 21st century, and treat it as a strategic resource in its struggle to not be left out in the global musical chairs game of climate change + resource depletion. They run it at a loss, and put the best minds they can spare to the task of making a computing infrastructure that is built to last.

By the 25th century, which is the time when the novel's events take place, Humanity has lost the ability to manufacture electronics, but computers built 350 years ago are kept in working order by a cadre of highly trained specialists (most of which have the skills of a geeksquad employee, but still). Common people have maybe heard some wildly innacurate legend about robots or computers. Wealty individuals are probably better informed but still cannot own one of those at any price. They only computers depicted of spoken about are US government property operated at US millitary facilities (or maybe there was one at the Library of Congress, do not really recall, though).

There's one post-collapse hacker in the novel, a secondary character that is part of the protagonist's crew. The author is not an engineering type and dances around the actual skills of this guy, but I'd say he seems able to use a debugger/hex editor and read binaries. His greatest achievement, though, is to fix and set up an ancient printer and recover documents from a disk that was "erased" but not wiped clean.

Re: Collapse OS

#225

Post by Scapeghost »

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.

What about burying something on the moon, with monoliths and radio sources marking its location?

Re: Collapse OS

#226

Post by RantyDave »

I've wondered about this a few times and always started by asking myself what would be left after armageddon.

Android phones. Tens of millions of them. It must be the most ubiquitous computing platform by now...

Re: Collapse OS

#227

Post by fao_ »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #169
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.

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…

Little do we know, there are five of them in existence already, by several ancient civilizations :)

I kid, but the more secure a vault is the more irretrievable it is, which only makes it useful to aliens, not us.

Re: Collapse OS

#228

Post by npo9 »

Spooky23 wrote: post #181
agentultra wrote: post #55

A neat idea! I think we could also get started now. Not necessarily de-escalating tech, but realizing that the fundamental supply of newer, more powerful chips might not last even with a shift to more plentiful supplies of rare-earth metals due to our need to get off of fossil fuels, fast. I think it might be useful in the more immediate term to be able to lock-in the minimum set of features that make the web and Int…

I think there is a business model for different reasons. As web client tech stabilizes and telecom regulatory rollback continues, there may be an opportunity for localized solutions to be landed for all sorts of different purposes.

I don’t see large opportunities in localized “web tech” (I’ll read as http based) business.

The whole reason the web works for business is that you can give something away to millions of people for ad revenue or sell something to very large groups for small amounts of money.

Localization reduces your customer base. The price a business has to charge would be higher. This is on top of the adoption problem.

Re: Collapse OS

#229

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

crpatino wrote: post #224
rwmj wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I may recomend the book "Stars' Reach: A Novel of the Deindustrial Future" by one John Michael Greer, maybe we can see this idea from a different perspective. From Greer's point of view, the factors that make today's hardware brittle are not technical, but economic. Corporations have to make electronics at a profit, and at a price point that is accesible to the average working class citizen. This business model wo…

Why is this dead? I've read the blog of the author in the past and found it to be inspiring, or at least interesting, because his short stories did the "what could be different?" thing very well.

(edit: wording)

Re: Collapse OS

#230

Post by dang »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #206

Best thing you and I can do to prevent climate change is to not have kids.

We detached this flagged, flamewarish subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21185952.

Can you please follow the site guidelines when commenting here? They include: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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