Collapse OS

The core premise of the story is that the people who have tech have access to a copy of WikiPedia, or some portion of it, which is like a super power in a post-tech world. Even if it is only used periodically (to prevent wear and tear on the computer), it would still be incredibly valuable to have an oracle that can answer questions like "how to nixtamilize corn?" or "how to preserve food without refrigeration" in a world without grocery stores.

This, of course, presumes libraries are also mostly gone, since you don't need WikiPedia if you have a library.

So basically Waterworld but for computers instead of water? I like it.

Why does the author think the global supply chain will collapse in the next ten years? What scenario do they envision?

Climate change? Will cost trillions of dollars and billions of lives, but will likely be played out over course of several decades. We will be stressing out about it but its not going to be electronics-ending apocalyptic

Nuclear war? Please. The countries that have the capability are also level-headed enough to use them to play brinksmanship, despite what the news is telling us. These countries want deterrence, not to blow stuff up.

Disease? We're too widely distributed and the most successful viruses are ones that infect but do not kill. Ebola is scary but its too destructive for its own good which makes it easy to contain. The most successful virus is the common cold, and possibly HIV which is certainly a serious problem, but nobody's out there building shelters because of that.

Water/food supply? Fresh water is a function of energy, and if anything is a plus about climate change its that we're gonna have a lot of fresh water raining down on us from the Earth trying to compensate for higher temps.

Second order effects from climate change will likely affect arable land and is worrisome but it may also open up new areas for growth and will likely play out over time, so I'm considering this more of a political problem.

The only things I can think of are either:

1) A sudden disappearance of rare earth metals needed to make electronic, which would be massively inconvenient but we'd figure out a way around that, either by it suddenly becoming more valuable to recycle old electronics or not needing them in the first place. Besides if this happens we'd just get extra motivated to start mining asteroids.

2) Celestial events like asteroid strike or Coronal Mass ejection hitting Earth in the wrong way. The first problem is mitigated with asteroid tracking and we're getting better at that, and the second one would make for an interesting 6 months but pretty sure we'd get back on track pretty quick.

I am all for technology that does not depend on a complex global supply chain - we will need to manufacture simple but sophisticated tech in space and mars in the future but this prepper BS is just fantasy driven by a hyper-apocalyptic news cycle shlepping around clickbait.

What am I not worried about that I should be? What massively apocalyptic event is going to happen in 10 years to turn us back to the middle ages? Seriously.

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 glitches. Think a Commodore 64 in a ridiculous white room.

But the book would be more about the consequences of this - do they eventually take the thing apart and jump-start a silicon chip revolution in the 1950s, or (more likely I think) does the government destroy the machine as the UK government did to the Bletchley machines after WWII, and because there's no ground-up computer theory does it set back computing for decades?

Z80 doesn't imply a desktop. See e.g. the Cambridge Z88. A Z80-based computer is also significantly easier to repair with rudimentary tools, and to create from scavenged parts, than an Android device. It can also be powered from pretty much anything, making for a great tool in an environment which is at risk of losing reliable widespread power distribution capabilities and which probably cannot create new li-ion batteries.