Glass memory?

On Sat, 2 Apr 2022 at 00:34, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: The comparisons of size, power, storage, cost, power usage, heat output and so on are often made. What is less often observed are the facts that a machine that takes multiple trailers can be repaired with spare parts. Anything made from ICs basically can't, except by replacing the ICs. What if you can't make ICs any more? Or rather, what level of IC fabrication would it be possible to construct from scratch? And if the war were long (sticking to the military context) or the conditions extreme (say, radical rapid global warming and a retreat to polar regions) and so all the factories and infrastructure were lost or had to be abandoned... I'm thinking of the current global chip shortages, and the floods in Thailand that screwed up supplies of hard disks a decade ago. What could be constructed from scratch, given copious amounts of scrap and waste for source materials? And aside from the hardware: Yes, modern computers have vast amounts of storage and power, but we use them all on OSes and apps that need millions of lines of code in dozens of languages, and gigabytes of storage. As a result, although they are vastly quicker, latency is arguably _worse_ now: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ What if... we had to reconstruct entire OSes and software stacks from scratch? Maybe because the authors were dead. Maybe because the computers they needed didn't work any more and couldn't be repaired. Maybe because we had to make new computers and they were smaller and slower. How much could be rebuilt? What could be learned from the mistakes of old? I recently wrote these pieces, which were fun to research: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/29/non_c_operating_systems/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/31/serenityos/ There are so many UNIX-like kernels in C on Github I couldn't count them all. In the many dozens, maybe hundreds. This is doable. But there are fewer in C++. Fewer still in Rust or Go. Very few in anything Wirthian or with garbage-collection. Well indeed! http://collapseos.org/ is relevant to this. But is an 8-bit the biggest we could realistically construct if all the IC fabs were destroyed?