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What if everything still ran on vacuum tubes? [video]
- magicalhippo 6mo agoCan't watch the video right now, but having thought about post-apocalyptic computing it seems to me that the biggest challenge is storage, both in the form of RAM and non-volatile. You can build a reasonably performant CPU using a thousand relays or less, but storing bits takes a surprising amount of transistor-replacements. We're so spoiled with our giant caches and DRAM. Hence why early computers used a lot of more analog ways to store data, like delay lines[1], core memory[2) and such. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory