The CPU is far from being the most sophisticated component of a computer.
At least if we're talking about #permacomputing, or, rather, scavenging and collapse computing. Okay, maybe in open source hardware, too.
Designs of new hobbyist computer architectures are seemingly revolving around inventing a CPU and/or mapping the peripherals on the system bus.
And you could find many simple CPUs based on FPGAs, logic chips, transistors, valves and even relays.
What you usually don't find is custom RAM. Before Intel introduced cheap solid-state RAM in 1969, there were at least six contemporary competing types of RAM used in computers, and at least as many were already considered obsolete.
What you don't find is peripherals. There are rare cool appliances, like punch tape readers. But have you seen a custom hard drive? A printer?
All these are "easy" in terms of relative complexity for industry. But they are simultaneously very hard for a hobbyist/DIYer/tech collapsnik.
Change my mind, show me the good stuff~
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aeva
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
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in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •aeva
in reply to aeva • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to aeva • • •aeva
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to aeva • • •@aeva I see! Well, you probably shouldn't do it INSIDE of your flat. It was a common* game for pre-00s children in Russia to cast lead on a campfire, and Zinc has a comparable melting point. If you're wondering where children would get lead, the answer was discarded car batteries and such. If you're wondering if that was safe, no, not at all.
Common = I have heard of this from at least three different regions, including a major city
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK • • •aeva
in reply to aeva • • •aeva
in reply to aeva • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to aeva • • •@aeva a counter point: if you ever tried printing with moveable type, especially without a linotype machine, you would very quickly realise that even the simplest of computers could speed things up a lot.
Even some mechanical linotype machines accept punched tape as an input for the type - word processing like it's 1880
aeva
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to aeva • • •@aeva well, we're in a nice time and place to try to solve difficult problems and write the solution down.
I am curious to learn more about things you consider horses!
aeva
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to aeva • • •@aeva ah, yes 😀 It's funny to think how people consider "homestead" a solution to this.
FWIW, I think a real collapse-like situation wouldn't mean immediate famine or dying out from cholera, anyways. I've read about the collapse of Bronze age, as well as the downfall of Romans. In those cases, humans didn't rapidly lose access to shelter and sanitation, and they had some food to go around. Even the excess mortality wasn't insane - certainly not the levels in some European countries during the WW2. All of those were very sucky times, that's for sure.
aeva
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to aeva • • •mirth
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in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Chip
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •emily, cat snuggler
in reply to aeva • • •aeva
in reply to emily, cat snuggler • • •emily, cat snuggler
in reply to aeva • • •@aeva I do think it would be hilarious to boot a computer from a vinyl record
it's like a cassette, but the initialization sounds *warmer*
Trammell Hudson
in reply to emily, cat snuggler • • •Booting from a vinyl record – BOGIN, JR.
boginjr.comJari Komppa 🇫🇮
in reply to Trammell Hudson • • •tenor.com/boNAq.gif
Yes No GIF - Yes No - Discover & Share GIFs
alantam888 (Tenor)Nina Kalinina
in reply to Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 • • •Jari Komppa 🇫🇮
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 • • •But I'm talking about something completely different here! On IBM PC and PC Jr, one of 8255s was used for a cassette interface - a 5-pin DIN that can be connected to a domestic casette player
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Nina Kalinina • •@Nina Kalinina Just googled (duckduckwent?) what a Colorado drive was, and all the results were about road trips.
I'm not familiar with this term. Could you possibly enlighten me?
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Defunct American data storage company
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Jeff Shaffer CBET, ret
in reply to Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 • • •Not a PC, but a Texas Instruments 99/4 I had in the early ‘80’s stored data through a cassette tape port
@nina_kali_nina
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Jeff Shaffer CBET, ret • • •Florian Idelberger
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Florian Idelberger • • •(wryl)
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •In my view, most electronics won't last. The aesthetic is fun, but if we're being realistic, I feel we need to go back to treating computing as a human activity, rather than one influenced by machines.
It's easy, if not desirable, to build things that look like foundations in isolation. But when you strip out something as basic as electrical or mechanical power, design gets.. complicated.
Programming languages, computing stacks, should be able to be run on humans.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to (wryl) • • •@wryl as they used to, in the past!
I think, with the knowledge that we have today, computers can be made using 18th century technologies. And there is meaning in having computers like that: engineering, science, even art.
Hackbroetchen
in reply to (wryl) • • •@wryl
A few years ago I made a "card game" that could be used to convert an 8 year old child into a touring complete computer running the brainfuck programming language.
The small stacks are memory cells, the big cards are the program. The figure is the pointer. The player just has to follow the instruments on the cards.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Hackbroetchen • • •@hackbroetchen that reminds me of Cardiac computer, but simpler! Do you have a link for the "print and play" version?
Hm, your post gave me a really cool idea, thanks!
Hackbroetchen
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Also it was a bit unfinished. It lacks a loop depth register.
Maybe I should finish that project.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Hackbroetchen • • •@hackbroetchen gotcha! Thank you for sharing anyway.
As for cutting out, there are simple paper cutter knives that are perfect for this task. I've had a great success with cutting a few hundred small cards with a machine like on the picture, with low effort.
smlckz
in reply to Hackbroetchen • • •@hackbroetchen @wryl
This reminds me of the game of Alligator Eggs, which seemingly allows an 8-year-old to learn about lambda calculus: worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/
We might be able to find similar ideas among other esoteric languages.
Alligator Eggs!
worrydream.comNina Kalinina
in reply to smlckz • • •emily, cat snuggler
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I think the realization you're approaching here is that collapse computing, as currently practiced, is largely cyberpunk LARPing.
You will have a lot of trouble manufacturing any sort of nontrivial IC, including but not limited to a CPU, in the apocalypse. If your design includes any such component and it's not readily salvageable from the devices normal people are surrounded by, you've already failed.
An FPGA is decidedly nontrivial and also needs an existing, working, relatively modern computer to program it, so that's worse.
Writing an OS for simple Z80 computers sounds like a fun project, but branding it "CollapseOS" is a bit silly because... where are you expecting to find the components to build a simple Z80 computer? If you're salvaging from Game Boys and TI calculators, why not just write an OS for those? The average person in that scenario will have a lot less trouble actually installing and using the thing in practice.
You know what's easy to find in the apocalypse? Existing working computers. Refurbishing them and building methods of powering them is *significantly* more doable without factories. But building an entirely new computer sounds a lot cooler to most people.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to emily, cat snuggler • • •@emily yep, I think I agree with you, generally. There is still value in CollapseOS and such - it's an attempt at simplification the stack and bootstrapping, and we need more of those.
I am thinking about this topic in the context of how personal computing stopped being accessible thing; we have lots of computers around, but we often cannot reprogram these, and it's unlikely we could repair or expand them, either. I am also remembering the beginning of 2022 and the effects of sanctions on Russia - the electronics shops quickly ran out of everything, and the marketplaces only had used Pentium 3 and 4, as well as Chinese 8 and 16 bit console clones. These times didn't last, because globalisation and parallel imports, but it was a reminder to me that supply chain hiccups or even total collapse are a possibility.
emily, cat snuggler
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Certainly, there are different levels and genres of collapse. All of them share the common theme of "we have some existing working devices and everything else must be built from scratch or from parts salvaged from those devices".
For existing devices, Linux is probably a more effective collapse computing project by accident than any dedicated software project will ever be on purpose, because of the sheer amount of stuff it can already run on and the number of copies of it floating around.
For building new devices, ICs are probably the wrong level to build up from. You can assume no new ones can be acquired in most realistic scenarios (either they aren't being produced at all, or supply chain issues mean you can't get them). If you have devices to salvage usable ICs from, they probably still mostly work, and pulling them apart is much higher risk than just using them as is.
On that note, I was under the impression CollapseOS targeted only homebrew machines, but I see now they also have ports for an assortment of real retrocomputers. That's great! The TI-84+ is the only one I'd realistically expect to be able to find outside a retrocomputing enthusiast's home, but it's a hell of a lot more than I expected, and so I partly retract my mocking of them.
But more than that, I want to see more "I made transistors in my garage" projects. *That* is the primary thing we'd need to actually bootstrap modern technology. Software is near trivial in comparison.
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to emily, cat snuggler • • •emily, cat snuggler
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to emily, cat snuggler • • •One is to leave them on the board they're from. It works best on boards with lots of testpads, and gives you a tiny breakout board for the chip.
Another is to glue the chip upside down to something, and solder the wires to each pin directly - with enough flux, the surface tension force makes it relatively easy to avoid shorts. It is a bit tedious for chips with over 20 pins, but it's doable as long as you have reasonably thin wires (like wires from transformers)
Nina Kalinina
in reply to emily, cat snuggler • • •Adrian Cochrane
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •@emily These thoughts reminds me of my writing exploring "what's the least software & hardware required to build an inclusive web browser?"
I think it helped me better wrap my mind around around existing operating systems, & really emphasizes how vital memory is!
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Adrian Cochrane • • •Adrian Cochrane
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •For exhaustive detail: adrian.geek.nz/from-scratch/#b…
(I'm currently preparing a page about dev tools for programming it)
In short: The primary (until visual output's required) component would be a hardware pushdown automaton. Which traverses a labelled graph to parse its input data.
Then I added an "Output Unit" to concatenate & demux the output into a new order, a rudimentary processor for occasional/trivial math, & a couple other things.
Anything specific you're curious about?
"Computing From Scratch" by Adrian Cochrane
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to Adrian Cochrane • • •argv minus one
in reply to emily, cat snuggler • • •@emily
Also, in a collapse scenario, you're going to be way too busy with basic survival to bother with hobbies. Nor will there be any electricity available.
@nina_kali_nina
Nina Kalinina
in reply to argv minus one • • •ZXGuesser
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I've built a printer from scratch, but it's an electromechanical contraption not directly related to computery things and not exactly a convenient form-factor.
(though watch this space, I still have loads of ink and I've been Having Bad Ideas for future projects after watching too many teleprinter videos... 😳)
oldbytes.space/@zxguesser/1125…
ZXGuesser (@zxguesser@oldbytes.space)
OldBytes Space - MastodonNina Kalinina
in reply to ZXGuesser • • •Zimmie
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •There’s hobbyist core memory.
The kind of person who makes a custom CPU design out of discrete transistors or valves or relays also often makes a small amount of RAM with flip-flops or individual transistors. It’s definitely hard to scale up.
Open mechanical stuff is indeed really rare, with the notable exceptions of rapid prototypers and that electron microscope from a while ago.
Zimmie
in reply to Zimmie • • •Turns out there have been more electron microscope designs released than i had thought. U Muenster’s SXM, the ChemHacker effort in ~2010, the recent NanoMi.
An open printer or plotter would be nice. And certainly seems like those would be easier to make than open electron microscopes or CNC machines.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Zimmie • • •Luka Rubinjoni
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Luka Rubinjoni • • •Zimmie
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I would expect most types of CNC machine to be more difficult than most types of printer, simply because print heads don’t fight back against the positioning system when they act on the feedstock. The only mechanical resistance they deal with under normal circumstances is on an axis the print head doesn’t move along. Pigment delivery and fixing definitely isn’t easy, but I doubt it’s as difficult as repeatable, extremely strong positioning of tools.
I wonder what would be the best pigment delivery system for such a printer. I’m partial to waxjets (e.g, Xerox Phaser) largely because of the low material waste, but some inkjets come close (particularly if the printer has refillable tanks and you get the ink in glass bottles).
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Zimmie • • •Zimmie
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Maybe for wood or plastics. It’s really hard to build a two-axis router to carve channels into metal, though. Swiss lathes and 3+ axis mills are difficult, too.
I’m not familiar with any DIY paper process which yields a uniform enough thickness and composition for most printer technologies. Definitely not good enough for traditional laser. Composition would be a problem for any jet-based. Struck prints like dot matrix or daisy wheel would probably be it.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Zimmie • • •@bob_zim DIY paper that works with laser is definitely doable. But making it thermo sensitive or cover it with thin metal film is hard 🙁
Soft metal CNCs are okay to make:)
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Zimmie • •like this
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Jonathan Lamothe
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in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Nina Kalinina
Unknown parent • • •Kirtai
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I wonder if anyone's tried replicating the memory used by two of the computers in the Voyager spacecraft. They each have three computers, two with some kind of wire memory and one with a more modern kind.
All the problems the Voyagers have had is with the more modern memory. The wire memory is still working perfectly afaik.
Jonathan Lamothe
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Kirtai
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Plated wire.
See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plated-w…
variant of core memory
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Nina Kalinina
in reply to Kirtai • • •Kirtai
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •mcc
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to mcc • • •There are a bunch of gpgpu projects, but that's not fun. And then there's FuryGPU but it's Vaporware until it's actually released: furygpu.com/about
Overview :: SIGA :: OpenCores
opencores.orgmcc
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Yeah! There's all these projects to make open-hardware laptops but without a GPU that supports standard APIs there's gonna be a hole in the open stack.
A thought I keep having is a good place to start might be to accelerate *just* what is useful for 2D compositing, and pass the rest to Mesa. Then you could get improved desktop performance, and most daily tasks don't involve 3D rendering anyway.
Nina Kalinina
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Hovav Shacham
in reply to mcc • • •@mcc Vortex¹ ² apparently supports Vulkan 1.0 via a modified SwiftShader—is that at all interesting? (I wonder if it’d be possible to also get OpenGL ES support by layering ANGLE.)
__
¹ github.com/vortexgpgpu
² B. Tine, V. Saxena, S. Srivatsan, J.R. Simpson, F. Alzammar, L. Cooper, and H. Kim, “Skybox: Open-Source Graphic Rendering on Programmable RISC-V GPUs,” in proc. ASPLOS 2023, ACM, Mar. 2023. Online: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582016…
Vortex OpenGPU
GitHubmcc
in reply to Hovav Shacham • • •@hovav I mean, it's a start! I think it's not what nina's looking for but I'd be curious at least to test it.
I'd heard there were projects like this but I didn't know they'd already reached a Vulkan compliance level.
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •@hovav I wonder how I'd go about porting this to this FPGA I've got if I wanted to run a test and see what it looks like. There's test instructions here github.com/vortexgpgpu/vortex/…
But it's pretty much "run our build scripts!" and don't explain what they do or what they target. Like would I need to integrate this with a litex setup, or…?
vortex/README.md at master · vortexgpgpu/vortex
GitHubNina Kalinina
in reply to mcc • • •vortex/hw/syn at master · vortexgpgpu/vortex
GitHubmcc
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Zorro Notorious MEB 🪷🪷🪷
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I don't know ... strictly in terms of STEM learning tools for bright kids, I'll take AdaFruit, Arduino, etc.any day over the GENIAC I had when I was a bright kid!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geniac
educational toy
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Michael T Babcock
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •The long-term problem wouldn't be finding hardware to read an old SSD -- but how to make such devices at all. If we look at a modern factory, how many of those tools could be remade 100 years after a collapse? Have we documented them? Or are they all trade secrets?
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Michael T Babcock • • •Sasha
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •I think learning to desolder and solder SMD components could be the top skill for a scavenger technologist. The vast majority of discarded tech is going to be SMD....
That's why I'm working on DIY co-processing using 8 bit CPUs from a begone era 😁😬
Nina Kalinina
in reply to Sasha • • •Sasha
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •Nina Kalinina
in reply to Sasha • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Nina Kalinina • •@Nina Kalinina I didn't know the term "ball grind array" but had encountered it in the past and based on context was pretty sure I knew what you were talking about.
Looked it up to be sure. Felt like one of my riskier searches.
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The Penguin of Evil
in reply to Nina Kalinina • • •