6 ms·

It's a good question, if we didn't have small microprocessors the alternatives would tend to be more material intensive (eg mechanical governors or clockwork) o

It's a good question, if we didn't have small microprocessors the alternatives would tend to be more material intensive (eg mechanical governors or clockwork) or be less efficient. We'd lose the Internet and cellphones, have to go back to mechanical telephone exchanges. I think we would miss CNC a lot, it's how the majority of production work gets done now in many industries, the manual machines are in the corner for one-offs. The computer controlled machines also tend to be making parts or doing QC or measurement to support the non computerised ones. So sure your injection moulder or die cutter might not need too many chips but wait until the molds and tooling wear out. Although who can send your factory orders anyway... Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. Small words but huge implications. We'd lose basically all capacity to print (billboards, t-shirts, books, office memos etc) , which seems bad. Like we had less digital ways to do all that stuff but they went away. It's not easy to go back. Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray. Behind the scenes all kinds of process control would disappear which would require massive rework. We'd have to retool most industrial processes to get computers out of the control loops. We'd lose the electric grid until people figured out how to decomputerise it. Probably trains, traffic lights, airlines, cars, shipping would be impacted in a variety of fundamental ways. The postal service would need to be re-architected (current reliance on parcel sorters and scanners). We'd have to move back to analog tv, radio and media production workflows would change dramatically. It's an interesting exercise to try and figure out what industries would hurt the most if chips disappeared tomorrow, I'm pretty sure it would be a catastrophe but it's not easy to follow it all through.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Mechanical solutions tend to be slower and also less reliable (more moving parts = more points of failure) Aviation would just cease to function, nearly every commercial airliner is heavily dependent on computer control, to say nothing of things like the reservation systems that are also very complex (pricing flights is a very complex use case for algorithms)
- kragen 4y ago
  Airplanes do predate computers, and there are plenty of airlines still flying that remain operable without electric power, even some commercial airliners.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Operable in an emergency, and reasonable to do for normal daily operations, are two very different things.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      True, but if "without computers" became the norm (with a good lead up time), then ways to make it work sounds like it could happen.
      - lrem 4y ago
        Maybe, but you're talking about "a generation, or more" kind of lead time. For a good start you have roughly no pilots able to safely fly your computer-free planes and no instructors either. So once you've managed to design the controls, you need to bootstrap your education pipeline on using them.
        kragen 4y ago
        I think you're imagining that current airliners and current flight instruction work very differently than they actually do. A very large fraction of flight instruction is carried out in planes that predate the embedded-computers era, starting in roughly 01975, and the more recent planes that carry most commercial air traffic are designed to simulate those computer-free planes as closely as possible. Yeah, maybe there would be a huge spike in aviation risk, so instead of one flight in ten million crashing, one flight in a hundred thousand would crash, but that's still not enough for aviation to become a dominant cause of death for weekly business air commuters. People would freak out when they watched the news but only in countries that hand over the reins of society to nervous nellies would it be a real obstacle to aviation.
NegativeLatency 4y ago
Personally I’d love to return to hand painted signs and advertising for businesses. IMO they have way more character but also it would be harder to slap up giant billboards for products and services I’m not interested in.
mrginger 4y ago
Slightly terrifying if you ponder the implications of a significant solar flare hitting the planet in this day and age.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
CNC/NC predates the microprocessor. It just wasn't practical for wide scale use without CAD.
jonjacky 4y ago
Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. ... This was widely done with tube computers in the 1950s. The first commercial computer, Univac, was introduced in 1951. Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray. The first commercial CT scanner in the 1970s used a Data General Nova minicomputer, which used small-scale integrated circuit logic chips, but did not include a microprocessor. Behind the scenes all kinds of process control would disappear ... The early PDP-8 minicomputers introduced in 1965 used discrete transitors, no integrated circuits. They were used in industrial control applications.

bobthepanda 4y ago

Mechanical solutions tend to be slower and also less reliable (more moving parts = more points of failure) Aviation would just cease to function, nearly every commercial airliner is heavily dependent on computer control, to say nothing of things like the reservation systems that are also very complex (pricing flights is a very complex use case for algorithms)

kragen 4y ago
Airplanes do predate computers, and there are plenty of airlines still flying that remain operable without electric power, even some commercial airliners.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Operable in an emergency, and reasonable to do for normal daily operations, are two very different things.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    True, but if "without computers" became the norm (with a good lead up time), then ways to make it work sounds like it could happen.
    - lrem 4y ago
      Maybe, but you're talking about "a generation, or more" kind of lead time. For a good start you have roughly no pilots able to safely fly your computer-free planes and no instructors either. So once you've managed to design the controls, you need to bootstrap your education pipeline on using them.
      - kragen 4y ago
        I think you're imagining that current airliners and current flight instruction work very differently than they actually do. A very large fraction of flight instruction is carried out in planes that predate the embedded-computers era, starting in roughly 01975, and the more recent planes that carry most commercial air traffic are designed to simulate those computer-free planes as closely as possible. Yeah, maybe there would be a huge spike in aviation risk, so instead of one flight in ten million crashing, one flight in a hundred thousand would crash, but that's still not enough for aviation to become a dominant cause of death for weekly business air commuters. People would freak out when they watched the news but only in countries that hand over the reins of society to nervous nellies would it be a real obstacle to aviation.

NegativeLatency 4y ago

Personally I’d love to return to hand painted signs and advertising for businesses. IMO they have way more character but also it would be harder to slap up giant billboards for products and services I’m not interested in.

mrginger 4y ago

Slightly terrifying if you ponder the implications of a significant solar flare hitting the planet in this day and age.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

CNC/NC predates the microprocessor. It just wasn't practical for wide scale use without CAD.

jonjacky 4y ago

Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. ... This was widely done with tube computers in the 1950s. The first commercial computer, Univac, was introduced in 1951. Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray. The first commercial CT scanner in the 1970s used a Data General Nova minicomputer, which used small-scale integrated circuit logic chips, but did not include a microprocessor. Behind the scenes all kinds of process control would disappear ... The early PDP-8 minicomputers introduced in 1965 used discrete transitors, no integrated circuits. They were used in industrial control applications.