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Collapse OS

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Re: Collapse OS

#291

Post by noir_lord »

cestith wrote: post #289
rst wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The system wasn't built for ruggedness. The chip had to be, because the system provided that ropey power supply previously mentioned and very few ancillary chips. It was a relatively inexpensive chip that one could build an even less expensive home computer around.

Precisely this, The ZX80 was a masterpiece of "just how close to the wind can we sail and still have a mostly functional for most people legit computer".

I mean it was built out of off the shelf cheaply (relatively) available TTL components and no real RF shielding (something variants in the US had to fix to comply with the FCC rules of the time).

It's astounding it was a commercial success but it cost 80 quid (as a kit, 100 pre-built) at a time when others where 3-4 to 10 times as expensive (average wage back then was around 110 per week).

In a very real sense it democratised computers to something almost anyone working could afford if they wanted it.

I know if it hadn't of been for the ZX-81/ZX-Spectrum I wouldn't have had a career in software engineering nor a life long love for computers, I was born in '80 to working class parents in the north of England even in 1987 having a computer was considered exotic among my cohort, I didn't see another one outside my family til 1990 (a C64 I lusted after).

Re: Collapse OS

#292

Post by icedchai »

Aloha wrote: post #284
unixhero wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are millions of millions of x86 computers and free software to run on them from any era. That should suffice for a collapsian civilization. Unless it's full on Mad Max post apocalyptic we're talking about.

Including Unix System 7, its been ported. Though I suspect your right, PC DOS is very powerful, and allows you to do a bunch of stuff.

You're probably talking about Unix version 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_7_Unix

You really want to go back 40 years to the dumb terminal era?

Re: Collapse OS

#293

Post by undershirt »

nwah1 wrote: post #245
undershirt wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 simple…

>Collapse is a property of every civilization we’ve studied How would you define "civilization?" Because sure, every civilization has an expiration date, but for current computing technology to be lost requires a worldwide civilizational collapse. Current global civilization is a decentralized collection of many civilizations which have all shared and replicated the knowledge of computing. >our debt keeps increasing…

Definitely, the Green Revolution et al is a solid basis for optimism, especially with Ehrlich losing his wager on resource scarcity. And I do like the malthusian lineage you described.

This empirical optimism is also paradoxically irreverent toward the immutable attrition of complexity. Our creativity has limits, whatever they are just pick something. At the risk of sounding flippant, 200 years of “creative patching” is historically too small a window to say we can continue subverting this “law” with eternal vigilance (I’ve heard this described as “we are running out of tricks”). Maybe I’m oversimplifying when I say we would have to approach the limit of absolute foresight to achieve this, but I think there’s some truth to it. For example, I like these explanations of our rational limits, with regard to managing a complex society:

- CHOMSKY[1]: We have in our heads a certain set of possible intellectual structures. In the lucky event that some aspect of reality happens to have the character of one of these structures in our mind, then we have a science. And that doesn’t mean everything is ultimately going to fall within the domain of science. Quite the contrary… personally I believe that the nature of a decent society might fall outside scope of possible human science.

- ZIZEK[2]: Hegel says, the owl of Minerva only flies out in the dusk. [owl being the icon of wisdom] So philosophy can only grasp a social order when it’s already in its decay.

Particularly unsettling is our reaction to the blurriness of our creative boundaries—that we insist on walking blindly toward cliffs to find where they are. Optimism in uncertainty is great, but some projections cannot be certain until too late.

A final quote that might address your first points:

- OPHULS[3]: Because our own civilization is global, its collapse will also be global, as well as uniquely devastating owing to the immensity of its population, complexity, and consumption. To avoid the common fate of all past civilizations will require a radical change in our ethos—to wit, the deliberate renunciation of greatness...

Anyway, this debate is covered in the book The Wizard and The Prophet[4]. I think we can tell which schools we belong to.

[1]: https://youtu.be/3wfNl2L0Gf8?t=1748

[2]: https://youtu.be/lsWndfzuOc4?t=6703

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1479243140

[4]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220698/the-wizard-a...

Re: Collapse OS

#294

Post by yellowapple »

Johnny555 wrote: post #243
yellowapple wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, in a worse-case scenario, it's much easier to build a Z80 by hand from individual transistors and/or logic gates¹ (which would still be absurdly difficult, but not impossible) than any ARM CPU (including the ones in any generation of RPi). In a slightly-less-than-worse-case scenario, it's much easier to build a Z80-based computer by hand (i.e. with a Z80 you pulled off some other piece of hardware) than your av…

A Z80 has over 8500 transistors, so even though it's much simpler than a Raspberr Pi, I don't think you're going to solder together an 8000 transistor processor in a post apocalyptic world. Even the old 4004 has around 2300. I'd guess that those 8500 transistors would be better used to build thousands of much simpler logic controllers to help automate infrastructure that's lost its computer control systems. https://e…

There are examples elsewhere in these comments (linked by myself and others) of CPUs with similar (if not greater) transistor counts soldered together by hand out of TTL chips or even out of individual discrete transistors.

There are multiple ways to skin a cat, though (perhaps literally; this would be the post-apocalypse, after all!), and you're right that there are numerous ways to put transistors to use besides building full-blown CPUs. One of the key advantages of a general-purpose CPU is that it's general purpose and can be made to do all sorts of different things, but there are certainly plenty of cases where that ain't necessary and you'd need a fraction of that capability at most.

Still, they'll probably go hand-in-hand. "Chips" are just discrete components, whether crafted from a single chunk of silicon or itself built out of discrete components and treated as a single discrete unit. Building a whole general-purpose CPU from individual transistors is much easier when those transistors are already arranged on a little board you can plug into your bigger board. Chances are that no matter if someone's building a whole CPU or something more special-purpose and limited, that someone will be doing so in terms of already-assembled-and-composable gates rather than transistors directly, if only for the sake of one's own sanity.

Re: Collapse OS

#295

Post by buzzert »

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…

Similar to this scenario is Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. Without giving too much of the story away, it's a great sci-fi novel that covers some post-apocalyptic topics, one of which includes a huge regression in PC performance/transistor count due to the major disruption of this fragile supply chain.

Re: Collapse OS

#296

Post by Aloha »

icedchai wrote: post #292
Aloha wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including Unix System 7, its been ported. Though I suspect your right, PC DOS is very powerful, and allows you to do a bunch of stuff.

You're probably talking about Unix version 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_7_Unix You really want to go back 40 years to the dumb terminal era?

If I'm running it on a 16-bit system, yes. I can built a teletype in a capable machinist shop.

Re: Collapse OS

#297

Post by Crestwave »

godDLL wrote: post #210
cable2600 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Couldn't get ReactOS to boot on any hardware that I own. HaikuOS boots with GFX disabled, but is not anywhere near stable. Will try the other two, I guess. Not holding my hopes up.

> HaikuOS boots with GFX disabled, but is not anywhere near stable.

Can you elaborate? It's been fairly stable for me.

P.S. It's just Haiku, not HaikuOS

Re: Collapse OS

#298

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

dang wrote: post #230
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

Sorry. I genuinely thought I was stating a scientific fact.

https://grist.org/article/humans-cause-climate-change-do-we-...

Re: Collapse OS

#299

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

tuesdayrain wrote: post #223
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.

Sorry. I genuinely thought I was stating a scientific fact.

https://grist.org/article/humans-cause-climate-change-do-we-...

Re: Collapse OS

#300

Post by 0xdeadb00f »

Johnny555 wrote: post #241
Scapeghost wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe we already did that in a previous civilization, but lost the ability to recognize the beacons.

The Sentinel anyone?
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