Glass memory?

[ben]

On 2022-04-02 4:27 a.m., Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Apr 2022 at 00:34, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> And, as you say, an Arduino or a Pi that fits in my pocket is orders
>> of magnitude more powerful and costs pocket money.
> 
> 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.
> 
>> Of course, sometimes I still miss the old days and old ways.  :-)
>> But then, isn't that why we are all here?
> 
> 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?
> 
Computers need memory, not ALU's. 4K static and 16k dynamic
were the last chips that seem to developed by hand. The late 1970's 
would be a realistic
goal to rebuild a civilization to. Looking around even 1985 err 1955
is a good time frame if you want to include time travel,flying cars and
hover-boards. :)
Ben.
PS: Hurry up and drop them nukes, get rid of the X86 forever. :)
PPS: Did any computer implement
multilevel/trinary  bolean logic ( true false unknown )