7 ms·
How long would it take to create a Windows 1.0 capable machine from scratch?
- supermdguy 8y agoReminds me of WaitButWhy's iPhone thought experiment[0], where the entire world reverts to a pre-human state and humans have to construct a functioning iPhone to break the spell. There's some interesting discussion on how long that would take, or if it would ever happen. [0]: https://waitbutwhy.com/table/iphone-thought-experiment https://waitbutwhy.com/table/iphone-thought-experiment
- jasonkostempski 8y ago300 years later: "Shit, we forgot to bring the license key."
- funkdified 8y agoThanks for the laugh :)
- Bilters 8y agoDon't really know. But if you decide to do so, please make a video series about it. I really enjoyed the series Ben Eater has produced making his 8 bit computer. [1] [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM&list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM&list=PLowKtXNTBy...
- Finnucane 8y agoWouldn't it be better to build a machine capable of useful work?
- CommieBobDole 8y agoI think the only real answer to this is "never". 20 people is well below the minimum viable number required to create a large population, and since the first step in building a CPU is "create a large industrial civilization", it can't ever happen.
- crooked-v 8y agoYou forgot the "create the universe" step.
- peterkelly 8y agoGod would take care of that during the first six days.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoThat's basically what the top answer says, but it's still an interesting question. Especially since it shows people how interrelated different aspects of the economy are to each other.
- xjwm 8y agoI agree. If you have ever read the book Crystal Fire, about the work done at Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950-70s, it took the best and brightest decades to solve the chemistry and engineering challenges present in building transistors and ICs. Even with 20 skilled PHDs as a starting point, I don't think you could overcome the practical manufacturing challenges in any reasonable amount of time.
- danvasquez29 8y agoone of the caveats of the question though is the people who are put there already know exactly what they need to build and how to build it; so you don't need 20 phd's to re-solve the chemistry and engineering challenges. It's almost purely a (still not solvable with 20 people) manufacturing problem.
- jstanley 8y agoThese are 20 people who live infinitely long, never age, and can work 12 hour productive days. As long as there is no single step that requires more than 20 simultaneous workers, I don't see why it's not solvable with these 20 people.
- teilo 8y agoThis reminds me of Riverworld. (Working from memory here - it's been a while since I read it) In the civilization that Sam Clemens created/participated in, they basically did this - recreated an industrial society which had basic, but workable computers.
- ConcernedCoder 8y agoOne of my favorite series! Grab your grail!
- peterkelly 8y agoIf anyone actually goes to the trouble of doing all this, please make it use \n for line endings instead of \r\n. Future generations will thank you.
- bumblebritches5 8y agoNah, fuck 8 bit code pages in general. have it use Unicode line endings (or, if Unicode has to be recreated, do IT right, and have it use 28 bits for codepoints and 2 bits describing the format).
- Dylan16807 8y ago"describing the format"?
- bumblebritches5 8y agothe code unit size, byte order, and how many code units are in that codepoint. you can fit all of that information into 4 bits when you just care about minimizing the size of that mini header. I know that, because I got bored and made up a quick proposal on it, not that I expect anyone else to even look at it.
- Dylan16807 8y agoIf you don't know code unit size and byte order up front, how do you even find the header? But I'm not really seeing the value. This is a variable-length format that isn't self-synchronizing, right? And if the header is fixed-length, then won't Latin letters require at least two bytes? It seems like it just loses to UTF-8 (which can support 31 bit code points, too).
- bumblebritches5 8y agobecause it's the top 4 bits... you read that as a byte, then read X bits more to get the rest of the code unit. yup and yup. UTF-8 is capped at 21 bits, theoretically it can support up to 6, but it's not allowed to because of UTF-16. This format would allow 28 bits to be encoded as 8, 16, and 32 bit code units. There would be no surrogate pair nonsense, simply write all the non-leading-zero bits into as many code units you need as well as the 4 bit header, and you're good. I'm not saying it'll ever happen, I know it won't, but if we could go back in time...
- zeusk 8y agoReminded me of this: Indistinguishable From Magic Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
- mseebach 8y agoMildly interesting literary reference: In Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (light spoiler), in the orbital world, they never, after 5,000 years, get to refined microelectronics. It's not an important plot device, so I wonder how gamed out that idea is, but it's remarked by Kath that their computers are nowhere as refined as those they had before the hard rain.
- JorgeGT 8y agoIt's very plausible. Most answers are concerned with the technical side, but the real difficulty is achieving a stable society with a continued interest in science and research. Organized civilizations have existed for millennia but war, religious zealotry and social uprisings have been resetting scientific advances every so often. The unknown Greek engineer who built/programmed the Antikythera Mechanism in the 2nd century BC could have worked with Babbage in his 19th century Difference Engine. Add the steam-powered Aeolipile of 1st century AD and the basic technical ingredients for the industrial revolution were already present in classical Greece. However, the proper social factors that allowed the exponential growth in science and research that resulted in the development of microelectronics and the information society are extremely difficult to achieve, more so than the merely technical ones.
- titzer 8y agoInteresting thought experiment, although, as others have pointed out, a huge section of industrial civilization would be required to get to the point of producing CPUs. A more interesting question would be how many volumes the build instructions would comprise.
- davidhyde 8y agoA human brain can be used as a general purpose computing device. Invent and produce low tech stuff like paper, pencils and an eraser and use your humans to execute instructions and check each other for errors. Alternatively use sticks and sand. The computer would run very slowly but it would run. 8 bit assembler for windows 1 code is not that difficult to get your head around, its just tedious. I recon you could do this inside a year.
- scandox 8y agoI’d say rendering screens could be epochal
- cup-of-tea 8y agoDevelop mentat skills.
- newfie_bullet 8y agoI see a fallout reference, I upvote
- lfowles 8y agoA Dune reference originally :)
- cup-of-tea 8y agoIndeed. I've never played Fallout. Are there many Dune concepts used in other works?
- Keyframe 8y agoOn the next episode of Primitive Technology. On a more serious note, IT MIGHT be doable for a 20-ish DIYers with current technology and some resources. Setting a limitation, of course, to not have them use any of the PCB workshops or foundries. PCBs are doable at home, ICs still aren't-ish. I expect a revolution on home-made ICs in the next few decades.
- narrator 8y agoICs need very difficult to handle chemicals like hydrofluroric acid to manufacture though. That kind of stuff will never be DIY.
- gnode 8y agoFrom the premise of the question on SO: > For convenience, we assume that the humans would not age or die during their participation in this experiment. Not dying will come in very handy when handling the chemicals.
- qbrass 8y agoThey'll realize not dying or aging is more useful than running Windows 1.0 and drag out the process forever.
- Keyframe 8y agoYes, but two things := DIYers on another level, not 'lemme watch some youtube tutorials, I can build this in a weekend' and second thing - alternative methods might be developed in the (near) future. To do what is proposed here (and for a bunch of other goodies) you would be able to do A LOT of things on a micron level. It would be a great start and a revolution of sorts.
- philipkglass 8y agoI have distilled HF out of powdered fluorspar and sulfuric acid in a home lab, from a lead tube I rolled out of sheet. I was borrowing steps described in an industrial chemistry encyclopedia from the 1860s. (All I did with it was conclusively etch/dissolve the glass receiving vessel. I didn’t have a proper receiver made of lead or paraffin-coated glass.) This sort of thing is admittedly quite hazardous. But if you look at older chemistry publications, you might be surprised what is possible with relatively crude equipment.
- narrator 8y agoThe hardest technological barrier to overcome is production and casting of high grade metals at scale. All the primitive tech guys on youtube have an easy time with everything until it gets to making a furnace capable of smelting iron. That's difficult as all hell and then building all the parts and the ore supply chain to scale that up is a very long process. Once scalable metals production gets going, one can progress to chemicals and then to electricity and to optics to semiconductors eventually.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoOne of the points everyone ignores is agriculture. If you're going to have a bunch of humans in a small area (civilization), it's going to be a requirement. Until you have mechanized/highly productive agriculture, more than half of your population's job will be food production.
- rasz 8y agoYou dont need optics to make semiconductors. You can make transistors in your garage without microscope.
- dmitriid 8y agoI forget the name of the paradox, but the gist is: we cannot recreate our current technology from scratch with our current technology. Because many intermediate layers have between removed and made obsolete.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoisland that contains all necessary resources as they would appear in a natural environment This is the problem, if civilisation collapsed it's never coming back because all those easy to access resources we relied on in the past are gone. It all requires advanced technology to access now.
- titzer 8y agoThere will be so much stuff left over from our civilization that it should be pretty easy to scrounge and scrape together stuff, Mad Max-style. Access to a landfill, steel, copper, other metals and some working electric motors/generators, and you're off and running. Heck, to make a generator all you need is a permanent magnet, some copper wire, and some mechanical energy, like maybe hydro or a bike crank.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoYou won't have much luck extracting shale oil with a couple of bike chains and an old washing machine motor :)
- matte_black 8y agoIs it possible that there could exist a tool such that would make this task possible? What would it need to be capable of? Very precise manipulation of matter?
- phkahler 8y agoThis is why I say the first people on mars will need local copies of wikipedia. It's hard enough to bootstrap civilization without having to relearn everything and have enough people to have experts in all areas.
- wbhart 8y agoWikipedia doesn't contain nearly enough knowledge. It tells you what a CPU is, not how to build one. It tells you some of the chemical properties of certain common chemicals, but not the millions of reactions, or thousands of entries in databases giving their exact physical and chemical properties, etc. Wikipedia would be a useful tool for bootstrapping, but is clearly a tiny, tiny fraction of human knowledge. It's short on a lot of technical details which fill the shelves and databases scientists, engineers, etc. depend on. It's also missing the living knowledge, that is passed from generation to generation as we teach people how to do the thousands of jobs that are necessary to keep modern society running.
- phkahler 8y ago>> Wikipedia would be a useful tool for bootstrapping, but is clearly a tiny, tiny fraction of human knowledge. I completely agree with you. Wikipedia would be just a start. Having an electronic library with high quality texts (and videos) from all areas would be even better. Whatever information they bring, it will be best if it's free to anyone and everyone there.
- OldSchoolJohnny 8y agoI would say the most useful thing when we get close to it is a general purpose robot capable of jumpstarting civilization. We need a few of those in bunkers around the solar system.
- lev99 8y agoI don't fully understand what single machine could do to "jumpstart" civilization. Does the robot focus on agriculture, medicine, education, culture, or industry? If it is "general purpose" it could work on all, but it's only one machine, and there is too much to do for just one agent. When you say robot you imply that the robot would do the world of building the civilization. We'd need dozens to "jumpstart" a civilization. Maybe a single machine could act as a library of knowledge to teach people how to create a civilization. I'm doubtful people would be willing to follow such a machine long enough to generate 8086 CPUs.
- gnode 8y agoIt's important to consider that the workers wouldn't have to replicate the tech tree of the past. With access to all industrial expertise, as assumed in the question, what could be done more efficiently, or what could be done to better suit the ergonomics of a 20 person team? I think the inverse question is also interesting. What technology have we lost, because our current infrastructure has negated our need for it?
- Smudgya 8y agoGreat idea for a TV show.
- crististm 8y agoMildly related, I was reading this day about busy-beaver function. It jumps suddenly from n=7 because 7 states seems to be enough to do exponentiation. Apparently it is claimed that no person today knows all the steps required to build a pencil from scratch. It's overwhelming to think further to a Win 1 capable machine.
- tabtab 8y agoThat's a lot of bugs to recreate. Maybe blockchain AI can help generate the needed bugs :-)
- jvozza 8y agoThis reminds me of Thomas Thwaites The Toaster project. A great read and very crazy project. http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/ http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/