27 ms·

Collapse OS

• frabert 7y ago
  So, let me see if I understand this correctly: this is supposed to run on z80-based computers after an armageddon comes and all the other "modern" computers are out of business, so people start building them by scavenging parts. Ok. So, first of all, how are you supposed to download this thing onto your homebrew computer, given that internet will most likely be down? "But if the collapse magnitude is right, then this project will change the course of our history, which makes it worth trying." Mmmh, I think the author is a bit on the hyperbolic side here. I'm quite sure that anyone that can design & assemble a z80 computer can quite comfortably code some basic utilities by himself just fine. All the others won't care a bit about your OS. Sorry if I sounded harsh, but I actually was.
  • blfr 7y ago
    You're supposed to download it now and keep around. Just like preppers do with MREs and ammunition.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      I said this further up the thread, but I'd rather have a raspberry pi, some screen cribbed from a smartphone, and some flash sticks. Why plan for less than the raspberry pi level?
      • maze-le 7y ago
        Because the pi might be needed for more demanding workloads (networks, routing, sdr radio system). With this solution you can build low-tech control systems and programmable switches with a bit of logic where a raspi would be overkill. But the doomsday scenarios aside, this is super useful as an educational device. It can teach people what computers actually are and how they operate on the lowest possible level.
        • MetalGuru 7y ago
          This is what excites me about this project. Another commenter posted the NandToTetris course, which is along the same lines. Computers/software are so complicated now, so much understanding gets lost in the upper levels of abstraction. Everything just seems like black box magic.
      • jotm 7y ago
        Or you know, a laptop. I've got like 6 of them piling up dust and all they need is 19V. The oldest from 2008, the batteries on 3 have sadly failed being unused, everything else still works. I've also got 2 desktops from 2003ish (Athlon64 and Pentium III), they probably work, too, although they're stored in a garage (along with some other stuff like VCRs and CRT displays). Not to mention routers old and new, all running Linux. Yeah, why plan for less? All I need to do is scavenge around my property :D Though a garden, livestock and a greenhouse will be a much higher priority. No one needs any sort of computing when they can't eat.
        • naasking 7y ago
          > Or you know, a laptop. I've got like 6 of them piling up dust and all they need is 19V Mechanical parts fail first. The keyboards on those laptops will be gone after a few years of use. The USB ports won't last much longer. How long will the thermal paste and internal fans last? The point of the z80 is that they're cheap and relatively easy to build from scavenged parts.
          • jotm 7y ago
            Not sure where you scavenge parts for a z80, I think it's much easier to scavenge parts for PCs. Plus, laptops are way more fixable than you seem to think, with simple soldering. Fans can be kept going for years with grease. External keyboards are ubiquitous. It's strange how people here bang on about RPi when a simple laptop is even more flexible. And I'm also thinking more of a "repository of knowledge" use, not just simple controllers.
            • naasking 7y ago
              > Not sure where you scavenge parts for a z80, TI calculators, microcontrollers, and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80#Embedded_systems_and_consumer_electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80#Embedded_systems_and... > I think it's much easier to scavenge parts for PCs. Plus, laptops are way more fixable than you seem to think, with simple soldering. Fans can be kept going for years with grease. Collapse OS is talking about timelines of a century or more. Non-mechanical computers are the only ones that will last that long without the supporting infrastructure.
  • badsectoracula 7y ago
    It may take a while but you could go Altair-style, by making a computer that is programmed through physical switches and then go and input every byte one-by-one. Though some automation would help here (AFAIK some people used a dotted paper tape reader and only entered the tape loader code by hand and the rest of their programs were loaded via the tape).
  • flohofwoe 7y ago
    It's just a few thousand Z80 instructions in assembly notation. You can print it on paper, store the listings somewhere safe and type the code in by hand just like in the old days.
    • xmprt 7y ago
      Why is that possible in this fictional reality but stockpiling an RPi isn't?
      • pstuart 7y ago
        Because it doesn't fit the given narrative: it's all about scavenging/recycling. Your reality does make better sense, but doesn't make a good story.
      • Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        There are vastly more Z80's in circulation that Raspberry Pis.
        • yellowapple 7y ago
          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 average ARM-based computer (including any RPi). ¹ "logic gates" not necessarily being transistor-based, either; one could take a cue from the guy building a 32-bit RISC-V machine with vacuum tubes: https://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/vtc/ https://www.ludd.ltu.se/~ragge/vtc/
          • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
            Uhm.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Acorn_RISC_Machine:_ARM2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Acorn_RISC_Ma... says about 30.000 gates, which is 10.000 less than Motorola 68000 and arguably faster. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch at least made us Amiga and AtariST geeks envious. Furthermore there is 'Microsequencer' like described there: [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsequencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsequencer and following up from there to for example [4] http://www.microcorelabs.com/mcl65.html http://www.microcorelabs.com/mcl65.html which is a 6502 softcore with microsequencing applied Alas... There are many options to choose from according to the available technology, tools & knowledge. One does not have to make an exact copy of something which made sense for arbitrary reasons, which don't necessarily apply when doing it from scratch under different circumstances.
  • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    He specifically speaks of a "distribution" phase as imminent collapse seems apparent, before "blackout". So everyone who knows about it would hypothetically get a copy, and perhaps begin stockpiling some relevant hardware. (SD cards seem like a good commodity to stockpile here, as he supports them, but they're likely incredibly hard to manufacture post-collapse.)
  • big_chungus 7y ago
    There are a very large number of Z80s around today and in-use. They are dirt-cheap and just right for many embedded applications. More importantly, they're simple enough to grok and to wire by hand; so yeah, were I stripping components for a make-shift computer in a post-apocalyptic world, I might just go for a Z80.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • whywhywhywhy 7y ago
    It's just a high effort apocalypse larp.
• alwaysanagenda 7y ago
  The digital version of prep-er style hoarding for the not-far-off-inevitable apocalypse. Love the idea to make it run on simple 8-bit CPUs that will be scavenged Fallout-style, but seems to presume that no 'newer' technology would survive and be functional. Wonderful to see, none the less.
  • ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    His idea presumes not that you can't scavenge newer technology, but that we can't replicate, repair, and manufacture more of it. Computers are built with computers. Advanced computers were built with less advanced ones. Sure, we can try to use some of what we found that survived, but will we be able to build manufacturing to build a modern processor with what we find that still works and the expertise we still have? If we can't manufacture new smartphones, we need to have a baseline of computer to develop new computers that can eventually develop computers that can develop smartphones. Essentially he's proposing that if we lose our societal ability to compute advanced things, that we be able to fall back to the Z80 rather than the abacus. Not sure I'm totally sold on it here, but it's an interesting topic to say the least.
    • cestith 7y ago
      The standards for a clean room to manufacture a 1980s home computer CPU or modern lower-tech microcontroller are far, far less stringent that the clean rooms for a 7nm or 10nm part. The photolithography equipment you need is far less precise and far more common. There are a lot more fab cranking out IoT device chips than Xeons.
• admay 7y ago
  I feel like this can also be achieved with a Puppy Linux USB stick, a lightweight laptop, a charger, and a power source. If I'm around and able to make it, one of my laptops will probably be working too. That's just in a "lets be real" sense in my mind though. What do I know? I'd probably be dead pretty quickly Fun sounding project though! I'll definitely try to install it on something at some point!
• mostlysimilar 7y ago
  This is a fun idea. I often think about hoarding a collection of software and media for an end of the world scenario. Then another year goes by and the world is still here.
  • admay 7y ago
    I have an external hard drive with some games and stuff to watch on it along with important contact and personal info. I also keep a copy of personal info on a USB drive, just in case. Less for the end of the world, more for if I get stuck and need to prove who I am or the wifi goes out during a storm. It's come in handy before
  • rnd0 7y ago
    No law against updating the software collection and the media ...that's what I do.
• digitalsushi 7y ago
  I was pontificating about my 401k fund and what I should do if I find it no longer exists when I need to start using it. The older gentleman who was polite enough to listen to me said, "It's ok guy, if that 401k doesn't exist, then neither will you". And so I think I will not stockpile any computers for later. I do like the engineering spirit of this however.
  • mattnewport 7y ago
    "It's ok guy, if that 401k doesn't exist, then neither will you". There are a number of ways that can not be true without a large scale societal collapse. Fraud involving pension funds has happened many times in the past (Bernie Madoff, Robert Maxwell being two high profile examples). The last financial crisis brought a bit more attention to the topic of counterparty risk - the idea that your "safe" investment is only as safe as the institutions that are backing it in many cases. It's not necessarily a high priority concern but I think it's worth at least considering splitting your retirement savings across more than one account with different institutions. There are also lots of conceivable larger scale crises with historical precedent (many in the 20th Century) that would render your retirement savings largely worthless without leaving you dead. In many of those you would have more pressing concerns than your 401K but it still seems like not a bad idea to have some physical things of value that you keep somewhere secure but accessible (cash, perhaps gold and/or silver).
    • nradov 7y ago
      401(k) plans have individual named customer accounts and strict auditing standards. A Bernie Madoff type scam isn't really possible. Even if Vanguard or Fidelity goes bankrupt the customer accounts will still exist. There's no counterparty risk (except for cash actively being transferred in or out).
      • mattnewport 7y ago
        Even if you have full confidence in auditors and regulators (Arthur Andersen?) that only guarantees that you own the contents of the account. What about what's in those accounts? How familiar are most people with the details of the various mutual funds and/or ETFs that might be held in their accounts? How complex are the webs of obligations inside those funds? If one or more large financial institutions were to have a Lehmann Brothers situation how long might the assets in some of those funds be tied up in litigation, even if they were actually still there? These concerns are all likely fairly low probability but there's certainly a whole range of possible scenarios between "my retirement funds are completely secure" and "I'm dead in a global thermonuclear apocalypse".
• java-man 7y ago
  Is there a rad-hardened version of z80?
  • skykooler 7y ago
    I have found many people saying that a rad-hardened Z80 with ferrite-core memory was used on the Space Shuttle, though I can't find an authoritative source to back that up.
    • java-man 7y ago
      unlikely [0] though Sojourner rover used a rad-hardened 80C85 [1] [0] https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?id=7356 https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_compute...
    • yellowapple 7y ago
      The Shuttle did indeed use core memory for awhile, but in what was basically a repackaged and rad-hardened System/360 (so not Z80-based AFAICT): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/4_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/4_Pi
  • yellowapple 7y ago
    There allegedly was one, but I can't find any info on it. Given the relative simplicity of a Z80 compared to newer CPU designs, it should be relatively "easy" to harden it. There was definitely a rad-hardened version of the 8085 (similar to the 8080, and therefore to the Z80), which was used on the Sojourner rover (among various other NASA and ESA spacecraft). Seems like RISC processors were more common for this, though (looks like most relatively-recent NASA spacecraft - including pretty much all of NASA's Mars landers after Sojourner - use(d) rad-hardened POWER CPUs, e.g. the RAD6000 and RAD750).
  • cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    Fairchild F8 was common as a rad-hardened 8-bit CPU in space and military tech. That's simpler than a Z80, and potentially more flexible.
• wailupe2k 7y ago
  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
  • BeefySwain 7y ago
    To be fair, the scope of a project that would require the ability to jailbreak / root arbitrary mobile devices running arbitrary OS versions would be massive, much less creating an OS that would run on all of them. Smart phones are a lot of things, but general purpose computers are not one of them.
    • wailupe2k 7y ago
      https://www.kingoapp.com/android-root/devices.htm https://www.kingoapp.com/android-root/devices.htm , I think there will be a few orders of magnitude more devices laying around that are easily jail broken than z80s.
  • amiga-workbench 7y ago
    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.
    • wailupe2k 7y ago
      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.
• bovermyer 7y ago
  A fascinating thought experiment. As the author points out, probably useless, but still fascinating.
• rst 7y ago
  I like the concept, but I'm not sure that the Z-80 is the best implementation substrate -- it's got a lot of oddball properties and special case instruction encodings (due in part to the way things were squeezed in around the base 8080 instruction set). A PDP-8 can be implemented in fewer transistors (original DEC wiring diagrams are on bitsavers, and github has source for several clones in Verilog), and DEC already shipped a moderately full software suite for it.
  • exDM69 7y ago
    I think the point is in that there are so many z80 chips out there for scavenging and that there are plenty of consumer devices that can be used (like TI calculators). Even if they stop making them today, the supply will last long.
    • noir_lord 7y ago
      They are also the cochroach equivalent of a processor, tough as hell, functional on a ropey power supply and can be used to make a simple 8 bit machine with very few ancillary chips - the reason they ended up in the sinclair zx's.
      • cestith 7y ago
        Similar reasons are likely why they were in the TRS-80.
        • rst 7y ago
          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 RF shielding.)
          • 7y ago
• akhilcacharya 7y ago
  I really like this idea! Makes me wonder what possibilities become, er, possible if we up the computing power a few orders of magnitude to a Pi Zero W or Pi 4. From what I understand it’s fairly easy to use a Pi as an LTE Router for longer ranges and WiFi for shorter ranges. I wonder if the right microsd cards and were stockpiled one would be able to reconnect several communities in a mesh.
• jolmg 7y ago
  Why Z80? Is it like the 2nd most common processor type or something? Where would one find a Z80 when scavenging?
  • garmaine 7y ago
    TI calculator. Old school game boy.
    • biztos 7y ago
      Dunno if this counts because I guess it's the "eZ80" but it looks like TI still makes one: https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-calculators/ti-84-plus-ce https://education.ti.com/en/products/calculators/graphing-ca...
      • garmaine 7y ago
        The TI-83 and TI-86 series calculators were Z80 based. Apparently they discontinued those in 2004. Huh. Maybe the m68k would be a better target? Actually if the OP is serious about this project, I would write base kernels for Z80, m68k, armv7, and RV32i. The last one isn't widely available, but has the advantage of being both modern architecture and allowing open-source specs for how to construct one from scratch.
        • collinmanderson 7y ago
          eZ80 in the TI-84 Plus CE (still manufactured) is backwards compatible with Z80 code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80
  • SwellJoe 7y ago
    It's extremely common, even today, though probably not the processor I would pick (I think 68000 family, perhaps?), but it's probably a reasonable choice. You're going to be able to find it embedded in literally millions of devices and it's simple enough for one person to build a computer around it. I suspect the argument against modern Intel chips is just their complexity. They need an incredibly complicated and somewhat fragile support infrastructure...you can't build a modern PC motherboard in your garage and you don't expect modern PCs to last decades. They're very common, though, and I suspect there will be plenty of PCs to scavenge, at least through our lifetimes. But, the next generation will probably have trouble keeping them going...I've got a 40 year old C64 still running with nearly all original parts, but I am nearly 100% certain my modern laptop will not last even a decade without repairs using parts that can't be manufactured without modern infrastructure.
• joombaga 7y ago
  Does this work for the T80 FPGA core?
• SwellJoe 7y ago
  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 probably not my highest priority when thinking of "when the shit hits the fan, as seems more likely today than it did five years ago, what do I want to have in my survival kit?" One of the questions I keep coming back to for such a scenario, and still haven't come up with a great answer for, is how does someone living in a world without the ability to manufacture a computer still have computers that work 100+ years after the last one was made? Even manufacturing transistors without modern methods is non-trivial. Will a Z80 last 100+ years? I mean, maybe, if it's kept dry and not exposed to anything corrosive. I've got a Commodore 64 that's ~40 years old and still works...so, 100 years seems reachable, but there have to be extenuating circumstances to get to that "post-tech" world (though I guess in a post apocalyptic world, the value of computers would be seen as minimal for a few years while survival is the only concern, so just forgetting could be enough).
  • tiborsaas 7y ago
    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.
    • Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Could a Z80 do these things effectively? Honest question.
      • tiborsaas 7y ago
        Yes, sensor monitoring (movement, heat, wind) is just simple IO handling and I'm sure managing a SQLite database would be in it's capabilities. If a C64 is capable of all if this then it can be done. Even chat is possible for example between two buildings where radio might not penetrate the walls. But sure, at that point if you can lay down cables, then it's simpler to just build a telephone.
• unhammer 7y ago
  Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay's Cuneiform Tablets seem relevant: https://archive.org/details/tr2015004_cuneiform https://archive.org/details/tr2015004_cuneiform
• cubedrone 7y ago
  I had been thinking about similar projects myself. I figure that experience with the z80, 68000, and the 6502 would give someone a platform for hacking for at least the next century. There are some dozens of 68000-like chips in a single car. I/O is as simple as LEDs and toggle switches for the bare necessities, such as bootstrapping other I/O options. Worked for the Altair 8800. From there one could implement morse-like momentary switch input. In these (possibly far-fetched) scenarios, going back to things like ticker tape and printers would make a decent amount of sense. Perhaps spools of wire could be used as "tape" for programs and data, as wire recorders existed before plastic tapes were available. I love seeing how home fabrication is developing, with people making simple silicon in their garage, but there is value to a basic tool chain that doesn't require as much sophistication and supply chains. I truly hope we don't live to see such a world, as the suffering would be immense. That said, I have no idea how complex supply chains can be expected to persist without fossil fuels.
• carapace 7y ago
  Give me a good slide rule and a manual of practical mathematics, eh? As for scavenged parts, you're going to need a warehouse of manuals and datasheets, eh? Depending on the details of your post-apocalyptic scenario planning, simple automation driven by relays or clockwork logic will be more likely than e.g. scavenged microcontrollers. I applaud the spirit of the project though: I don't want to live on Gilligan's Island making everything out of coconuts and vines.
  • AlEinstein 7y ago
    > As for scavenged parts, you're going to need a warehouse of manuals and datasheets, eh? You're right! As a thought experiment, let's say I download CollapseOS and then switch off my internet. I have in my house a normal complement of electronic devices. I have a soldering iron, some wire etc. I assume if I start taking things apart I'll find some Z80s. Those Z80s will be living on boards with clock chips and memory etc. Where do I even start?
• tiborsaas 7y ago
  Anyone wondering why the Z80 chip, just read the FAQ: https://collapseos.org/why.html https://collapseos.org/why.html "The z80 has 9000 transistors. 9000! Compared to the millions we have in any modern CPU, that's nothing!"
  • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    No, it's 9000. That's not nothing. You may be able to scavenge old ones for a long time, but building new ones will be non-trivial.
    • yellowapple 7y ago
      Non-trivial is still better than outright impossible.
      • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        Well, the first transistor was in 1947. The Z80 was first manufactured in 1976. That's 29 years of improvements in manufacturing technology before the Z80 was manufacturable. So if we have to start over, the Z80 is sure better than the Pentium (or at least, we can make it first), but it's still outright impossible for quite a while.
        • yellowapple 7y ago
          It's possible to build CPUs with many times the Z80's transistor count by hand¹, albeit with great effort and taking up a heck of a lot of space (and probably nowhere near the speeds of a single-chip Z80). ¹ http://megaprocessor.com/index.html http://megaprocessor.com/index.html
• headcanon 7y ago
  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.
  • Fnoord 7y ago
    I believe there to be a different reason than the ones you mentioned. I believe what might happen is the end of "the Internet" as we know it. Russia is ready to detach their networks from the rest of the world. China has the GFW. Hackers from around the world are targeting each other for their governments and getting a get out of jail for free card (scratch that: a carte blanche). I like FOSS, but it is also easier pirated by a country who don't adhere to the licenses. There is a country who pirate en masse, who steal trade secrets. That country is called China. Worse, the USA does it as well, via NSA etc. Either way, I don't think such is a good premise to start this/an OS. There are much better argument to be made to prefer a lightweight OS. Intellectual curiosity, for one.
• jedberg 7y ago
  For anyone interested in the idea of keeping old computers running, I highly highly recommend the Living Computer Museum in Seattle [0]. It was started by Paul Allen and has some of the coolest stuff I've ever seen. Their goal is to restore old computers to working condition and have them look/feel/smell/work the same as they did when new. I got to see a ton of old computers that I had as a kid. I even got to write a program in BASIC on the original IBM PC like I did when I was a kid! [1] [0] https://www.livingcomputers.org https://www.livingcomputers.org [1] https://twitter.com/TeriRadichel/status/1164369796307116033 https://twitter.com/TeriRadichel/status/1164369796307116033
• bcaa7f3a8bbc 7y ago
  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 in a controlled environment, such as 8080, Z80, m68k, motherboards, logic chips, I/O controllers, ROM/RAM, generic electronic parts, soldering irons, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, schematics, documentation, textbooks, software. We also keep some complete, standalone computer systems such as desktops and laptops, and all the parts that need to service them. We also need to preserve the old semiconductor production lines around the world, although probably not in the same bunker. Even if we fail to build better systems, 8080s are already useful enough! Meanwhile in peace time, we need to form a team of experts that makes a roadmap to rebootstrap the computing technology for the future using parts from the bunker, with a step-by-step plan, that can be easily followed and executed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
  • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    I like the idea. But I ask (not being annoying), do we really need it? Seems like having all of that more distributed in the hands of users would be a better protection against unavailability.
    • mathgeek 7y ago
      Usually the idea behind a doomsday vault is that you're keeping everything securely in one place in case there is widespread disaster that sufficiently wipes out the distributed knowledge. They're not mutually exclusive.
      • GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        Gotcha. Thank you for clarifying.
      • 7y ago
• agentultra 7y ago
  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 Internet useful then distribute that as widely as possible on low-power, commodity platforms with resilient networks that could survive super-storms knocking out huge swaths of devices in one fell swoop. Low-power p2p protocols, mesh networking, recycling devices, component-platforms that allow scavenging and make-shift repairs, etc. Until we can solve the green energy problem it might be nice to know that even if your community gets hit with a storm or flood, it's still possible to restore and maintain network services rapidly in the aftermath. Simply being able to send a message to someone would be a big deal.
  • hutzlibu 7y ago
    " Simply being able to send a message to someone would be a big deal. " The simple way would be radio morse
    • trentlott 7y ago
      Or packet radio [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio]?
  • Spooky23 7y ago
    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.
    • npo9 7y ago
      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.
• mschaef 7y ago
  In the event of a sufficiently large collapse, people will be so far down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs that an OS will be about the last thing on their minds.
  • yellowapple 7y ago
    The problem is that modern society - and the current size of the world's population - is dependent on a lot of programmable devices. For example: agriculture, where tractors and other farm machines nowadays have ECUs/ECMs (let alone even more programmable bits and pieces). Same for the vehicles used to actually transport food from farms to the rest of the world. There are plenty of other examples, too, like medical devices and water extraction and heating/cooling and other things that are nowadays the difference between life and death for a lot of people. Sure, we were able to make do a century or so ago, but not with 8 billion people and counting. People will die without some way to keep the various microcontroller-driven systems up and running. It's a long shot that we'd be able to adequately replace a microcontroller in a tractor ECM or a pacemaker or an air conditioning system or a water pump, but a slim chance is better than no chance at all, and the latter is exactly what we'll have unless we're thinking about and testing out solutions now, while we still have the resources to easily do so.
    • mschaef 7y ago
      > the current size of the world's population - is dependent on a lot of programmable devices. Not to mention the energy supply chain. If the supply chain required to make electronics collapses, that probably also means the energy supply chain has collapsed, or has at least been severely disrupted. That seems far more likely to be damaging and far more quickly that a lack of ability to keep a microcontroller running. If I don't have gas for my car, it doesn't really matter if I can fix it when it breaks down. (And I run out of gas in a few hundred miles, but repairs are required on the order of tens of thousands of miles.) This is really what I was trying to get it with my first comment. The problems presented by a lack of ability to make new technology are the sorts of problems that take months or years to become critical, but in a true collapse setting, the issues that matter most would unfold in days or weeks. (I feel like I should point out that I don't think any of this is particularly likely.)
• srpinto 7y ago
  "Her" design. Yeah. Sure.
• neurobashing 7y ago
  The manifesto/winter-is-coming bits and overall design reads to me like TempleOS without the mental illness. Eg, a shell that "compiles", no protected memory, etc.
  • dusted 7y ago
    > without the mental illness. "But if the collapse magnitude is right, then this project will change the course of our history, which makes it worth trying." Let's say the jury is still out on that one? :D
• rkeene2 7y ago
  Relevant to this goal is Stage0 [0], which is attempt to bootstrap a compiler toolchain. It is still a work in progress but the most promising attempt I have seen. [0] https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 https://github.com/oriansj/stage0
• codeulike 7y ago
  Reminds me of Global Village Construction Set https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization
• guidoism 7y ago
  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?
  • coryrc 7y ago
    I have some answers 1. Yes; 10C reduction in temperature means doubling of life. I've known pentiums to last 10 years at 60C+; just running processors at 30*C instead is 80 years minimum. Main thing is to use leaded solder so you don't get electromigration problems. 2. Solar panels and batteries. Battery voltage is chemical and fixed by physics; nickel-iron batteries can be rebuilt and last forever. Solar panels can be oversized to provide enough energy even when they degrade over time and/or the computer can just be used at a lower duty cycle. 3. Make it big and hard to move in a sturdy box. 4. Flash can last that long if it is periodically rewritten, kept cool, has redundancy, and isn't updated often.
    • jacobush 7y ago
      5. Default to a ROM which is made in such a way it is basically immortal.
  • MrDelta 7y ago
    Hey mate. Dunno if you recall, but some time ago you recommended How to Read a Book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20847508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20847508 Would you like us to share notes on the book itself? I've practiced its teachings for the last 3 years or so, and I'd like to chat with someone about it. Sorry if this comment is a bit irrelevant, but HN doesn't really have a DM system. /shrug
    • guidoism 7y ago
• X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
  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.
• notreall1238123 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction#Failure_of_modern_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_and_post-apocalypt...
• adrianmonk 7y ago
  Neat idea, but I'm not seeing the window of usefulness for this. If society collapses and recovers relatively quickly, we likely can coast for 10-20 years on the computers that have already been built. This would be what I'd expect to happen with a point-in-time catastrophe that disrupts everything but then ends and we can all set to work to rebuilding everything. (Like a massive economic collapse, huge meteor strike, nuclear winter, etc.) Even if 95% of computers become inoperable, there's a lot you can do with the remaining 5%. Probably more than what you can do with new stuff you build. Another scenario is that we recover really slowly. This would be due to some kind of enduring factor that holds back humanity, like a really long-term famine or global political instability that we somehow cannot reset. In that case, what's the hurry to develop software that's ready to go? Maximizing compute capability doesn't seem like it would be the thing that tips the scales and allows society to get rolling again. For that you need to solve whatever the root problem is. TLDR, if we fall, maybe there is nothing holding us down, and we can bounce back up relatively quickly, in which case we don't need this. Or there is something holding us down, then it seems unlikely that computing is what we need to solve that. Maybe there are other scenarios that I haven't thought of, though. Or ways that computing would help in the above scenarios.
• hybrids 7y ago
  Why z80 and not x86 or AArch, which are both more readily accessible today? This whole idea reeks of someone trying to reconcile their love of old computers with their poorly considered death-cult Malthusianism.
  • yellowapple 7y ago
    Z80 chips are way more common than even x86, by merit of them having proliferated in embedded microcontrollers.
    • hybrids 7y ago
      By accessibility I didn't really mean "commonality in terms of numbers," I mean that they are generally more easier to configure and work with (on top of being readily available). x86 PCs and ARM-powered mobile devices are very plentiful, are fairly modular without requiring more sophisticated tools, and avoid a high barrier of entry (i.e. deeper EE experience). The author thinks that when their imagined Mad Max society comes to be, they're going to be picking up a soldering iron against old Segas and TI-84s. If for some reason that you need to use computers in a developmental capacity (since the author's OS has an assembler and an `ed` clone) in a "post-collapse society," I don't think it would be that hard to find some discarded HP desktop or laptop to work on.
      • yellowapple 7y ago
        > I don't think it would be that hard to find some discarded HP desktop or laptop to work on. In the short term, you're probably right. Most modern desktops and laptops will hopefully last a decade or two (maybe three). In the medium term, even these will start to break down. One of the key points of failure will be thermal paste; these modern CPUs run quite a bit hotter than a Z80 or 8086 or what have you, and the thermal paste has a finite lifetime (especially the cheaper stuff used in most mass-produced desktops and laptops). Unless you've got a whole bunch of the stuff stocked up, or you're able to setup an immersion cooling rig (with a coolant that's non-conductive and non-corrosive), these PCs will eventually overheat and die. Flash memory and hard drives both have similarly-finite lifetimes, too, so there goes the vast majority of mass-produced storage media (thankfully flash memory longevity is driven by use, so it should be possible to stockpile flash media). Older chips like the Z80 or 8080/8086 or 6502 tend to avoid the thermal paste problem entirely (by not requiring any sort of heatsink at all), and have simpler memory interfaces (which makes it easier to wire them up to replacement memory, including potentially hand-wound core memory or hand-wired SRAM in a worst-case scenario). In the long term, even these scavenged Z80s will probably eventually wear out. Hopefully by this time at least some degree of chip fabrication will have been bootstrapped back into existence, in which case replacement Z80s and 8080s/8086s will most likely be possible much sooner than replacement 386s and ARMs. ---- EDIT: > x86 PCs and ARM-powered mobile devices are very plentiful, are fairly modular without requiring more sophisticated tools, and avoid a high barrier of entry (i.e. deeper EE experience) Possibly, from a certain point of view. Apples-to-apples, though, this is very unlikely to be true. Z80-based computers tend to be electrically simpler (by a pretty wide margin) than x86-based or ARM-based computers. There's a lot more supporting circuitry between the CPU and memory/peripherals/etc., which means more components that can fail (and be difficult to replace, especially given the tighter electrical and latency tolerances of the average x86 or ARM motherboard).
• hutzlibu 7y ago
  Why can it be only useful after a collapse? If it can be useful, than it can also be useful today to all the (poor) tinker people around the world today. There are lots of alternative eco villages etc. trying to be self sufficient, who do all kinds of recycling and improvised technology. If this adopts with those people, then it might be useful. But if they cannot use this today, then I don't see how a broken down surviver group could use it.
• voldacar 7y ago
  Could this run on TI calculators? They use Z80 but I don't see them mentionied. Looks like a cool project!
• AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  I think some sort or retro low-performance OS should start with NeXTSTEP. Ryzen processors have 80MB of L3 cache! IIRC that may have been twice what was needed to run the colorized versions of NeXT. A lot of "man the old days were all we needed" recollections of Windows and DOS forget how crappy those OSes were... But NeXT? That was basically a modern OS, with a bit less anti-aliasing. XWindow systems STILL look horrible compared to it. It fits in L3 cache. 5-10 NEXT hard disks fit in RAM! It had a web 1.0 browser, TCPIP networking, all the productivity apps. It had DOOM. Sure Mach the microkernel was buggy and leaked memory, but kernels... there's lots of kernels now. I think it would be a great project to start with the NextOS and carefully rebuild it up with good security and multitasking. It would be fun to run NeXTSTEP on bare metal with RAMdisks (spare a processor to do the writes to SSD), and compare with other systems, see if it feels ludicrously fast or not.
  • unixhero 7y ago
    Interesting idea. But okay, how? Could you scribble down a proof of concept Quemu configuration in order to achieve it? Also where to get Next compiled for AMD64?
    • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      Decompile the old kernel? Yeah, definitely above my modest pay grade, and OpenStep was created to be more portable (but probably not open in the OSS sense). Hm, there is GNUStep You are correct that one can't snap their fingers and create the community that even FreeBSD has. The last big corporate sponsor opportunity for this was the infant smartphones like the Palm Pre era (they owned Beos IP at that point I think) and early Android.
    • AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      Decompile the old kernel? Yeah, definitely above my modest pay grade, and OpenStep was created to be more portable (but probably not open in the OSS sense). Hm, there is GNUStep You are correct that one can't snap their fingers and create the community that even FreeBSD has. The last big corporate sponsor opportunity for this was the infant smartphones like the Palm Pre era (they owned Beos IP at that point I think) and early Android. Sigh, that reminds me that Beos should have been the foundation of OSX, if not for the exhorbitant buyout cost they were insisting on.
• hyperion2010 7y ago
  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 for a single user to do _everything_ in situ. There are very few existing systems that meet all three of these criteria across the whole hardward-firmware-software stack, and modern technology companies are actively moving away from this. At all levels this requires extensive and open documentation and implementations, and ideally a real standard. The hardware level would probably need a complete rethink, and if you want good peripheral support (e.g. to be able to try to access whatever data device you come across) then you need a solution that doesn't require a subsystem kernel maintainer for everything, or you just give up on that. A potential 4th requirement here could be a large supply of parts since in most scenarios it is extremely unlikely that anyone will be able to get a fab working again for hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe radiation hardened large feature size ICs or something like that. The alternative would be a zillion RPis (with some alternate data storage interface) so that hopefully some of them survive and continue to work after 100s of years, but this seems like a much riskier bet than trying to actually engineer something to survive for a very long time. Above the IC level the ability for someone to replace parts without special tooling beyond maybe a soldering iron also seems like it is probably also important. At the software level there are two existing systems that might serve, one of the Smalltalks, or one of the lisps (my bias says common lisp, despite the warts). Assembly and C are just not a big enough lever for a single individual, and other things like Java seem to have been intentionally engineered to deprive individual users of power. The objective here is not to be fast, the objective is to retain access to computation at all so that the knowledge of how to work with such systems is not lost. Also at the software level the requirements pretty much preclude things like browsers that are so monstrously complex that there no hope than an individual could ever hope to maintain a legacy artifact (or probably even compile one of the monsters) for interpreting modern web documents. I do not think that we can expect the current incentive structure around software and hardware to accidentally create something that can meet these requirements. If anything it is going in the other direction as large corporations can employ technology that can _only_ be maintained by large engineering teams. We are putting little computers in everything, but they are useless to anyone in a world without a network.
• oneepic 7y ago
  This project is really out of left field, especially as someone who doesn't tend to wear tinfoil hats. I wouldn't mind if it was marketed more as some kind of lightweight OS though.
• akozak 7y ago
  What if computers caused the collapse though? Doesn't this risk reseeding the problem? Maybe it'd be better in the long run if we have to reinvent.
• brian_herman__ 7y ago
  Reminds me of the anime series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone
  • rafaelvasco 7y ago
    Pretty good series btw.
• brian_herman__ 7y ago
  Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Stone
• albandread 7y ago
  I like the Collapse OS concept. I once typed Fig Forth from a booklet I ordered from America into a Sharp Z80 computer. Society was in the main computer free at the time. It was like the post collapse era. To restart the software industry from scratch; I recommend etching a modern version of that Fig Forth booklet onto stone tablets; perhaps provide a scheme interpreter written in forth as well. They will never need anything else.
  • drivers99 7y ago
    I was also thinking that if I had to start from scratch, Forth would be a great way to do it. I'm not familiar with Fig Forth, but I just ran across these assembly sources for various early CPU architectures: http://www.forth.org/fig-forth/contents.html http://www.forth.org/fig-forth/contents.html but they look really long. I wonder if that booklet you had was simpler than these. (Any idea if it's available online?) I was thinking something like jones forth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187248 which has a minimal assembly part (which is mostly comments explaining how it all works) and then quickly moves to implementing Forth in Forth itself.
• deleted 7y ago
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• bobloblaw45 7y ago
  A bit of a tangent but in the novel "The Windup Girl" they live in a post oil world which essentially ended up more of a total societal restructuring that pretty much resembled what we'd consider a collapse. Nations fell and in some places companies took over. Cities collapsed as the population shrank and technology shifted to focus more on bio engineering to make up for the loss of all the mechanical/electrical technology that ran our world since powering it all got a lot more expensive after the oil was gone. In one part a high security government installation was described with "ancient" PC's. They couldn't make new ones so they kept whatever they could running and the narrators mind was blown thinking about how much energy they wasted. I think one of the top priorities for a project like this should be making it easy to implement considering practically everything you would use now days to get help getting it working won't exist. No websites or forums or anything like that.
• flipgimble 7y ago
  Related to the post, I highly recommend reading "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" [1] if you are interested in foundational technology that underpins our civilization. This type of information is often forgotten or taken for granted in our highly dependent late-capitalism society. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_Our_World_from_Scratch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
• deleted 7y ago
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• RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  Forth is the ideal language for bootstrapping a cobbled-together computer from whatever scraps you can find. Forth gives you a shell, an assembler, a disassembler, and a rich, extensible programming language in a few kilobytes. You can peek or poke hardware interactively, or use the REPL as a calculator. Forth-style assemblers also make cross-compilation very practical. If I was tasked with bootstrapping a post-apocalyptic computer from junk, a hard copy of a well-commented Forth implementation would be a welcome assistance.
  • sdegutis 7y ago
    Sounds great! Can we get all that with a less confusing syntax? That’s my main difficulty with forth.
    • RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
      The syntax is unfamiliar to most, but it's very consistent and learnable. The syntax is one of many aspects of the design that keeps the whole thing simple. The use of a stack to pass arguments between words makes the kind of "pipelines" which are common in CLI shells very natural. I can think of few, if any, other languages I would want to use interactively as a replacement shell without complex line-editing assistance. For those curious as to what a modern machine using Forth on bare metal as an operating system might feel like, check out Open Firmware: https://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware https://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware (If you have an OLPC sitting around in a closet somewhere from the Give-One-Get-One program years ago, you already have a serviceable and physically robust Forth machine ready to roll! Same deal for some older Powerbooks and Sun workstations.)
      • drudru11 7y ago
        I wish openfirmware was the norm. PC BIOS and UEFI are horrible in comparison.
  • enneff 7y ago
    Here's a very nice forth implementation for the C64 (not z80-based, it's 6502, but close): https://github.com/jkotlinski/durexforth https://github.com/jkotlinski/durexforth
• harperlee 7y ago
  To me a much more interesting avenue to be able to “bootstrap the pc era” would be to achieve DIY knowledge enough to recreate TTL on a garage. Afterwards you can at least create a computer from the 80s, as Ben Eater is doing in his youtube channel.
• gtirloni 7y ago
  I'm interested in the reasons the author sees for the ~2030 collapse.
• elchief 7y ago
  Should come with a bicycle to generate power
• cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  If I were to pick an 8-bit processor for a post-apocalyptic future, it'd be the single chip version of the Fairchild F8, not a Z80. It was designed to be extremely simple and reduced in scope to the minimum of what a processor needed. It went into space. Radiation hardened versions were made. The original version had its functionality broken up into multiple chips. That could allow for easier repairs. I don't know how many transistors were in it, but I doubt it's more than the Z80 or 6502. The RCA 1802 is another one I'd consider. In fact, it will likely outlive the human race entirely, as it's in the Voyager spacecrafts.
  • naasking 7y ago
    > It was designed to be extremely simple and reduced in scope to the minimum of what a processor needed. It went into space. Radiation hardened versions were made. But you won't find them in calculators just lying around that you can scavenge. Remember, the narrative driving this is post-economic/supply chain apocalypse.
• LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Seems strange to go for something like Z80 from the 8-Bit home computer age, when the goal is simple manufacturing. Should go with the PDP-11 line instead which had a long history spanning different technologies, going across large and simple to manufacture to more integrated and miniaturized, faster, with more memory, with a standardized set of peripherals and instruction set architecture.
• Ericson2314 7y ago
  Eh, our current ecosystem is such a mess I wouldn't miss it. I worked on cross stuff for Nixpkgs in part due to a more optimistic take: Let's bootstrap all the good stuff en masse onto freer hardware.
• d0gsg0w00f 7y ago
  Best thing you and I can do to prevent climate change is to not have kids.
  • 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    This suggestion is stupid as suggesting killing yourself. Giving offsprings, taking care of them and enjoying them growing up is the reason to live first place.
    • christophilus 7y ago
      The way I look at it is: such thinking will only take a generation to die off.
    • chowells 7y ago
      That's an incredibly insulting and myopic viewpoint.
  • invalidOrTaken 7y ago
    If that's the price, so much the worse for the climate.
  • tuesdayrain 7y ago
    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.
    • d0gsg0w00f 7y ago
      Sorry. I genuinely thought I was stating a scientific fact. https://grist.org/article/humans-cause-climate-change-do-we-just-need-fewer-humans/ https://grist.org/article/humans-cause-climate-change-do-we-...
  • 7y ago
• GeorgeTirebiter 7y ago
  Why not a Rad Hard 8086 https://www.renesas.com/in/en/products/space-harsh-environment/rad-hard-digital/rh-microprocessors-peripherals/device/HS-80C86RH.html https://www.renesas.com/in/en/products/space-harsh-environme... or maybe a Rad Hard RCA CPD1802 https://www.renesas.com/in/en/products/space-harsh-environment/harsh-environment/microprocessors-peripherals/device/CDP1802A.html https://www.renesas.com/in/en/products/space-harsh-environme... ? Those might survive a hydrogen bomb if not too close. I've thought about this a little, and I think rebooting vacuum tube technology from scratch is possible more easily. Not trivial, but possible. Once you get reliable triodes, you're on your way.
• aquabeagle 7y ago
  But if someone has a hint about useful prior art, please let me know. http://fuzix.org/ http://fuzix.org/ - lots of 8-bit targets, z80 included http://cowlark.com/cpmish/index.html http://cowlark.com/cpmish/index.html - has a vi-like editor, assembler, and is cp/m compatible so it can run lots of old cp/m software like various compilers
• RantyDave 7y ago
  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...
• roca 7y ago
  I think a useful adjunct to this sort of project would be a project that describes a really useful general-purpose CPU that can actually run a lot of advanced software but that's still as simple as possible --- and work out a realistic path for bootstrapping its manufacturing. A stripped down 32-bit RISCV for example only needs tens of thousands of gates but could run most modern software. In conjunction with that, it would be good to have an archive of useful software and data in a durable format where access to that data can also be bootstrapped. I'm not sure what that format would be...
• unixhero 7y ago
  This collapse thing. It's real?
• AltmousGadfly 7y ago
  Are Z80 systems and alike very common? Seems like a niche hobby. I'm thinking old phones, tablets, and portable computers will be more common. I keep several bootable USB drives which have lots of ebooks, audio books, videos, software, and games along with several old laptops/netbooks which were free. I also keep some of those files on microSD cards to make them accessible with tablets. IMO collapse will be very boring so lots of books, audio files, video games, and music would be nice to have if it can be run off small off grid solar setups.
• tov_objorkin 7y ago
  In the Herbert Dune, civilization collapsed because of smart machines. So after renaissance they are completely banned for the future use.
• jaakl 7y ago
  Ok, but what user programs will we really need then for it? Other than re-building technology. Isn't "too much technology" basically the single biggest root issue of current state of humankind, and planet in general?
• monsonite 7y ago
  IMHO - the Z80 is probably not the optimum starting point. Its close cousin, the 8080 started out as a TTL cpu built into early Datapoint terminals. Intel took the Datapoint logic design and ISA and integrated it into LSI silicon. Anything a Z80 can do, an 8080 can do - albeit less efficiently. With an 8080 equivalent running a serial character display terminal based on an oscilloscope CRT (1940s RADAR tech) you have an input/output device. This leaves the main job of processing to another cpu, which could be 16-bit for arithmetic speed and efficiency. The late 70s, early 80s 8-bit machines were only underpowered because they were doing all of the video output using the same cpu. Separate computation from video generation and you get a much faster system. 8-bit cpus rarely needed an OS. They were really only capable of running single applications at a time. All an operating system does is separate hostile C code applications from each other. C is probably not the best starting point to reboot society using 8-bit systems. Forth, or some derivative might be better. Charles Moore's original 1968 listings for Forth on an IBM 1130 are available from here: https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/issues/63 https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/issues/63 Remember also that every mid-1970s microprocessor generally relied on a minicomputer (built from TTL) for its software and logic design. If you go back 10 years (1965) to the PDP-8 minicomputer, these were built from diode-transistor logic or DTL - made from discrete diodes, transistors, resistors and capacitors. This sort of technology could possibly be re-booted more easily for post-apocalypse society. The original 12 bit PDP-8 contained 10,148 diodes, 1409 transistors, 5615 resistors, and 1674 capacitors. See- https://www.pdp8.net/straight8/functional_restore.shtml https://www.pdp8.net/straight8/functional_restore.shtml Scale these figures by 1.33 and you have the approximate requirements for a 16-bit architecture. Whilst over 50 years old, the PDP-8 could run BASIC at speeds not too dissimilar to the early 8-bit micros that appeared in 1976 - about 10 years later. It used a modular construction - and if you did find yourself with an excess of diodes and transistors, the best approach might be to build a series of logic modules - loosely based on the 7400 series, but using DTL for simplicity. If you were to standardise on a footprint similar to a 40 pin DIP, you could probably recreate about 8 NAND gates in such a device. Some years ago I looked at the NAND to Tetris cpu, and worked out a bitslice design based entirely on 2-input NANDs. Each bitslice needed 80 NANDs, so a 16-bit machine would need 1280 gates. Memory would be difficult, but something could be implemented using shift registers. You could of course revert back to storing charge on a CRT screen - which formed the basis of the 1K words of memory on the Manchester Baby machine of 1949 (Williams Tube). Finally - never underestimate audio frequency generation, and storing signals as audio tones - something that cpus are good at. Possibly use a rotating magnetic drum for storage. In the summer of 1984 - a friend and I, who both owned Sinclair ZX81s set up a 1-way data link between one machine and the other across our college dorms - using a FM transmitter bug and an FM radio receiver - over a distance of 300 feet.
• dusted 7y ago
  I'll chose TempleOS for my go-to "paranoid schizophrenic philosophy" daily driver over CollapseOS anyday, and I'm atheist.
• insamsu 7y ago
  Everyone is comparing it with Seed Valut[0]. its better to have a complete eco-system for computers. But its a nice forward step to save the technology in small computer, which gives the basic idea of how to proceed further. in case if you start storing the everything you need lots of space underground which seems not feasible. In my opinion, there should be system in which all the blueprints for the technology is saved & that machine should be self sufficient to run on its own power, memory and should be capable enough to educate or atleast gives the basic idea of structure, as after the post Collapse, if anyone who is lucky enough get this technology, can improve and build a new system. I like the idea of Collapse OS, in similar manner create the machine which can run any software/os or supports most basic and used operations. Same goes with the books as well. ~Nauman
• nitoy69 7y ago
  They have much too rosy an idea of the future. Nuclear war is actually the only thing that will save them! By that time countries will be their own separate cyber-Fascist states, actually cooperating with each other to keep their citizens, by that time implanted with chips in their brains and connected to the central Net, in line. Oh, by the way, they won't be forced to have the chips implanted, they'll willingly line up for it! So they can get their Dominos Pizza, and Amazon deliveries, and Google Map directions all with a thought! Or so they'll be told. Besides, the asymmetry in computing power between the rulers and the enslaved will be laughable. The government will have even (more) powerful quantum based machines. Cobbled together 48K Z80 machines will be insignificant. If they're even tolerated. Which they won't be...
• kotongo 7y ago
  Maybe a system based on ARM or MIPS @ 1GHz very common in a modem-router. Z80 @ 8Mhz cannot dispay even a 640x480 image. it would be wonderful recycling modems as stand-alone computers
• laudens 7y ago
  Do you know that can be possible (more than what you can think) the situation you told, Mr Virgil Dupras, in 2022? You were thinking about informatic and not about events on the planet. For that time (2022) all the wolrd should have a negative situation where a solar storm arrives on the planet and destroys many electrical/electronics... It is called Carrington event and happens every 150 years... Please ask to the NASA as they know well. US Government started researches about to stop, already in 2004...
• diggitydoggy 7y ago
  Same, like if you enjoy compooters
• diggitydoggy 7y ago
  I enjoy comppotterts
  • diggitydoggy 7y ago
    Same, we are the same
    • diggitydoggy 7y ago
      poopy
• diggitydoggi 7y ago
  why my accoount goo awai