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Collapse OS

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Re: Collapse OS

#81

Post by hutzlibu »

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…

" Simply being able to send a message to someone would be a big deal. "

The simple way would be radio morse

Re: Collapse OS

#82

Post by wailupe2k »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #49
wailupe2k wrote: post #12

Lets think about what technologies are most likely to be around after an apocalyptic event... Probably something that everyone has, that there are millions of.. something with a screen and a keyboard... very light and easy to transport.... maybe even something with a battery, and signals processing chips.... na screw it, lets just use a desktop. :P

What on earth are you going to do with a pocket botnet? Without some kind of USB-OTG adaptor to break it out into useful GPIO for interfacing with other machinery, its going to be limited to playing flappy bird and failing to send telemetry over the now-destroyed mobile network.

A modern android cell phone has a camera, screen, light, keyboard, speakers, battery, and a cpu that is many times faster than the z80 counterpart and all the software to go with it. There are also various short range communication and mesh networking abilities (NFC /Bluetooth/WIFI). Its not too difficult to create a wifi router out of a phone. You can purchase many USB to GPIO boards cheaply online (as a pepper your stock piling stuff anyway, your not going to just find a z80 laying around either, there are even adapters for ham radios you can pick up cheaply). I could easily see using a camera network from cell phone for proximity alerting, mesh networking of a few city blocks to create a communications network and basic note taking and information storage fitting into a few phones storage, in addition to having a fully functional Linux machine. I'd wager that if you take all the time it takes to create this project and compare its success to the time it takes to buy 30 GPIO adapters, download the rootkit library for android and some cables, that you'd have more success going with the phones. Also, just think about moving around... a backpack of cell phones isn't going to have the failure rate that you'll get with exposed electronics.

Re: Collapse OS

#83

Post by eurg »

SwellJoe wrote: post #42
tiborsaas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers could give you better chances of survival. In a shelter / bunker let's say you can have a control center where you can monitor sensors and manage databases. These tasks doesn't require a computer, but saves you massive time to do something else.

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…

Well, honestly, I think for that type of knowledge, Wikipedia is actually a very bad starting point. It could have become something like that, but ... I blame Deletionism, and more importantly, the general aversity to "know how" pages. Yes, you could relearn math from Wikipedia, but I'm not sure there's enough stuff in there that somebody who didn't already know how would be able to recreate half-way modern antibiotics, or an old CRT TV tube, let alone an SEM etc.

Re: Collapse OS

#84

Post by hutzlibu »

tiborsaas wrote: post #34
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…

Computers could give you better chances of survival. In a shelter / bunker let's say you can have a control center where you can monitor sensors and manage databases. These tasks doesn't require a computer, but saves you massive time to do something else.

Or you manage to repair a advanced drone .. that can do scavenging in dangerous radiated areas for example (or just common drone, can scout for you). Solar panels will be valuable... But wind is easily to bild and generate as well.

In general, the scenario is, that the whole world is broken down, but full of tech. So many machines to get back to working. Machines beat muscle on a scale

Re: Collapse OS

#85

Post by omn1 »

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…

Please continue working on this novel; I would read it. You could even start publishing today with services like leanpub and get some early backers and feedback.

Re: Collapse OS

#86

Post by guidoism »

I love projects like these. One that has me fascinated is the idea of building a computer than can last centuries. Can it be done?

- Will the ICs last that long, can they?

- How will it get electricity if the sockets and voltage standards change?

- How do you make it durable to dropping, water, dust, etc?

- What sort of writable storage can last that long without degrading?

- How do you edit fonts as language changes over time?

- What sort of libraries and documentation do you include?

- Should you include some sort of Rosetta Stone for new users?

Re: Collapse OS

#87

Post by mattnewport »

SwellJoe wrote: post #42
tiborsaas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers could give you better chances of survival. In a shelter / bunker let's say you can have a control center where you can monitor sensors and manage databases. These tasks doesn't require a computer, but saves you massive time to do something else.

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…

"since you don't need WikiPedia if you have a library."

I have libraries and WikiPedia is still pretty useful. Searchability and portability / mobility would be pretty valuable attributes in this type of scenario.

Re: Collapse OS

#88

Post by philipkglass »

headcanon wrote: post #46

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-heade…

Regarding "A sudden disappearance of rare earth metals needed to make electronics", you (mostly) don't need to worry about that either. Fluorescent tubes and white LEDs use rare earth elements to convert blue/UV light to broad spectrum visible light -- these are how non-OLED displays generate back light. High strength permanent magnets contain the rare earth elements samarium or neodymium (with optional lesser quantities of dysprosium, praseodymium, gadolinium). Those are the only rare earth element applications worth mentioning as far as computer system components go. Strong rare earth magnets are still used in spinning-platter hard drives, but not in SSDs.

You could buy a new EPYC server with solid state drives, grind it up and homogenize the whole thing in acid, and the resulting solution would have a smaller percentage of rare earth elements in it than the same mass of ordinary crustal rocks treated the same way.

Computers don't need rare earth elements. Nor do solar panels, nor do most wind turbines.

See for example the "Consumption" section in the USGS 2015 Minerals Yearbook Rare Earths report:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium...

In descending order of global consumption volume, rare earth elements are consumed by the manufacture of catalysts, magnets, glass polishing media, and metal alloys. Everything else is just miscellaneous.

Re: Collapse OS

#89

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

One way to gain traction (pre-collapse) might be to hold competitions about getting it to run on challenging "salvaged" systems and demonstrating impressive ways to copy it from one system to another.

Re: Collapse OS

#90

Post by fernly »

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…

Yeah, no. I've handled parts of Whirlwind[1], a vacuum tube machine from just post-WWII, and the gap from that to a C-64 or any other circa-1980 machine is just too great. They were using discrete wiring, resistors and wires soldered to the bases of the vacuum tubes. The Whirlwind was the first machine to use core memory, and the 4K core memory unit is a box about the size of a phone booth. I don't know if PCBs existed before 1950 but if they did, they were certainly single-sided.

So now ask somebody really smart in that technology, like say Jay Forrester[2] who had just finished inventing core memory, to analyze this magic beige plastic box. He could probably recognize that the PCB provided connectivity between parts, but what are the parts, these little flat plastic tiles? I don't think it would be possible to work out from first principles what the functional contents of a DRAM chip is, let alone the CPU. Even if they x-rayed it, supposing they had x-ray tech with enough resolution to resolve a chip, how could they figure out that those little blobs are transistors? Transistors hadn't been invented!

I think they'd have to concede this is "sufficiently advanced" tech, in Arthur Clarke's phrase, to be indistinguishable from magic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Wright_Forrester

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