What do you think computing will look like in the ruins of modern civilization? Will the raspberry pi be a rare and valuable item prized for its adaptability in improvised postapocalyptic tech? Or will programmers be viewed as useless wastes of life, fit only to be ground into onions and fed to the hungry masses?
Postapocalyptic computing
Michael Scott
Nolan Bennett
I think computing and the raspberry pi would be important. As factions and groups would want to get an edge on each other. So programmers and CS people would be very valuable.
Lucas Cooper
computers will be extremely valuable in the short term, i think. but eventually all remaining computers will break and people will revert to a more primitive way of life for a most part.
programmers will become farmers, hunters, carpenters, and highway bandits. just like everyone else.
Chase Walker
what about the electricity?
Landon Ross
I dont know if that will be true I think sone groups would try to bring the grid back on . So they would attempt to fix computers and thr grid to grt it back on.
Kevin Ramirez
running water
Jeremiah Cruz
Something I was wondering about to, but I assume generators would still be a thing.
Jack Stewart
i agree that will happen in the short term, but basically all computers will stop working after 20-30 years after disaster.
from my understanding, the industrial techniques for making nano-scale processors used in today's devices are kept very secret and few people outside the industry even have a grasp on what kinds of engineering problems they have to solve to reliably make such tiny devices. it's not something that can be learned from reading a book or academic paper, and in that sense it could be the largest scale form of black magic in our time. Once those factories fall in disrepair (they require extremely sterile cleanrooms to function that would probably become too contaminated very quickly) i doubt anyone will be able to come up with a new factory for many years
Brandon Thompson
Remaking what is a essentially a photocopier isn't the hardest thing in the world m88.
Sure we wouldn't be sitting back at 14nm any time soon, but also computers don't really need to be as fast as they are now anyway.
Ayden Sanders
I doubt computers will be gone for long.
Plenty of engineers understand computer architecture and how semiconductor fabrication works.
The early photomasks for ICs were literally hand painted. The only hard part is procuring the pure silicone and dopants, but chemists should be able to produce them in small quantities.
Think about it: We went from vacuum tube computers like the ENIAC to the Intel 486 in just over 40 years. How much quicker do you think everything can be remade when not everything needs to be re-discovered, and a handful computers still exist to assist us?
James Bennett
Where would you get the gas?
Wyatt Russell
Tesla model 3 :^)
Caleb Ortiz
Presumably, there'd be some pretty large reserves of gas and oil available for a while.
After that, you can convert them to run off a wood gassifier.
If you're near a river, then just make a water wheel to turn the generator.
Or hell, windmills are a thing.
Connor Sullivan
They can be converted to run on biofuel
Dylan Bennett
Very correct. We also have to deal with wear and tear. NAND based flash solutions for storing data are going to wear out, and disk drives are going to die. Optical forms of storage might still be used.
I think the real problem for computing will be the batteries. They go to shit after a few years of use. Our culture of throwing shit away every few years or so means every single device we have will be fucking useless, and anything that lasts longer than 20 years will be the premium shit, or new old stock found in warehouses or sealed in some sheltered environment.
I've also read some articles about how CPUs might degrade over time.
superuser.com
Jeremiah Bell
eat beans
Cameron Stewart
Based
Thomas Turner
I can tell you that while computers degrade over time, they certainly won't crap out in 20-30 years.
I've got an old-ass Tandy Model 200, which came out in 1983, and that thing still performs flawlessly.
Colton Hall
Solar panels
Gabriel Nelson
Because stuff like that wasn’t built with planned obsolescence in mind.
Luis King
People would just revert to a simpler CPU. See "Linux in 8 bit micro controller".
Brandon Thompson
Eh, there might be some truth in that. It is built like a tank.
Still though, even if all the modern computers die, that still leaves a fair amount of old ones around.
If you've still got working computers, especially ones with parallel and serial ports, then industrial automation won't be too hard to bootstrap.
Oh jeez, yeah you can do that, but that's super slow.
It'd be more worthwhile to just write new software for the 8-bit'ers.
Heck, even making computers from discrete logic chips isn't hard.
See the SAP (simple as possible) CPU, and the Gigatron.
Luke Perez
What many are missing is the true threat to the current Desktops/Servers and that is the power. Not because you dont have it, but because it is not a pure enough wave or rolling brown/black outs. Without active UPS to protect them it will tear apart the power supplies and possibly fry the system with it. Because many use proprietary power supplies for specific models replacing it would be even harder if not ATX standard or at least guides available to rewire them correctly.
Laptops run into the issue of batteries dying out about 2-5 years normally now and days. Then they are power only and can run into same issue as the desktops. Thermal paste and fans will also need replacing after a long enough time.
Monitors and TVs will most likely survive due to numbers and not being always on so spares will be available.
Raspberry Pi runs into the issue of dying out microsd cards and usb drives. With no current factory shipping new ones you are looking at in 5-10 years it could become a mess after enough read/writes.
Adrian Long
>Not because you dont have it, but because it is not a pure enough wave or rolling brown/black outs.
Can you restate this in coherent English?
Are you trying to say that 60Hz, 120vrms, sinusoidal power is too hard to generate?
For a large, multiple kilowatt server I might agree with you, but laptops and mid-teir desktops would be easy enough to generate power for.
Brody Taylor
This should help a little. Older power supplies were more flexible on this, but newer models had some issues with older UPS units because of it. Again you have some window to work with but if the unit has already been damaged enough from age and whatever caused the disaster you want to be careful.
blog.tripplite.com
Jace Johnson
> sinusoidal power is too hard to generate?
Yes. Cheap UPS use approximation, you need a so-called "smart" UPS or a PSU w/o PFC.