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Rebooting The World?
Kristopher Johnson asks: "As things are now, it is pretty easy to develop software for new hardware platforms. Just write a cross-compiler on an existing platform, and then copy the binary to the new system. New hardware is designed and manufactured using software running on existing hardware. So what if we had to start over from scratch? Say some cataclysm occurs that fries all microprocessors and scrambles the contents of all existing ROMs, disks, CD-ROMs, and any other machine-readable media in all computers. And the same fate falls on all high-tech manufacturing equipment. What would be the fastest way to 're-computerize' the world? What would we do differently if we didn't have fifty years worth of legacy systems to continue maintaining?" It's an interesting thought, and one that I tend to not spend much time worrying about. For those of you who have, however, how do you think humanity would recover from a catastrophic loss of all electronic technology? My personal experience is that if something like this were to occur, we would not recover very quickly, but I'm not as optimistic as I was a few years ago. Maybe some of you can paint a better picture.
Who cares if all the computers end up being wiped out, and we have to start over. I'm sure these big companys (and research facilities) back EVERYTHING up on paper somewhere. They are bound to have the schematics on paper, or some other form of record, other than computers. Of course, maybe if this happened we could sneak into intel.. destroy the schematics for the x86 chips of their's, and then MAYBE they could design a chip that runs the x86 instructions AND doesn't burn its self to hell with all that extra heat.
The hardware side seems to be the more fruitful possibility. Incidentally, I can see a couple of scenarios where this could play out either now or in the relatively near future. First, the idea that human society might fall apart is well-founded on history.
Second, we're already in a situation where a lot of technology is available to a small region (namely US and Europe) and in the future this may become worse. Then other countries (in particular African and Middle East ones) would have to figure out alternatives to the missing technology.
Finally, when there is space colonization (a bit further in the future), the technology that is supportable on Earth simply will not cut the mustard. A lot of stuff (including society and culture) will have to be reengineered.
In English, it's "Blindness" by Jose Saramago. Superb book.
As people rushed to capture market share, they'd create sloppy designs, of which, one would become a standard, and that would act as the same legacy dead-weight we have now.
Let's call owning a computer membership in a, and not caring membership in b, so p(a)+p(b)=76%, and the remaining 24 we can get as a combination of
i) people who own a computer but who wouldn't notice if all the computers stopped working.
ii) people who don't own a computer but would notice if all the computers stopped working.
Emptiness of (i) is mutual exclusivity, which we probably have something close enough to (close enough because there's probably some 3rd world farmer who owns a scrapped computer which he uses as a seat or stand of some sort) to say that (ii) makes up the remaining 24% of the world. This would consist of people who don't own a computer, but use one at work, or at the public library, or maybe a kid who plays video games on his friend's computer even though he doens't have one of his own. Now of there were none of these people, that would be mutual exhaustivity, but these people exist, so the guy who you're replying to has perfectly good math.
You, OTOH, could stand to brush up on your combinatorics.
To paraphrase Brooks (Mythical Man Month fame), those decisions weren't the best at the time.
12. Get our asses kicked by the Plutonians when they launch their counterstrike.
This article scares the hell out of me. I mean, where would we get all of our free porn?
You say that info in CD would not get zapped...
How do you propose retrieving such information?
=)
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
You haven't gone shopping for a while, have you? I don't remember the numbers is question, but I had gone to the store, and the total was, say, $1.83. I had some change in my pocket, so I give the cashier 2 singles, a nickel and 3 pennies. She tried handing back the change, I ended up having to say "just try it" before she would key it in. Whoa! I got a nice quarter back!
Tip to cashiers: if you don't know how to subtract, don't go out of your way to show it.
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I'm not kidding.
I'd be screwed.
*Clear!*
- One team sorts out how
to get back to some semblance of modern computing.
That is, how to build the first computers by
hand, how to use them to build better ones,
how to implement improved technologies at each step.
- Another lot coordinate a large look at the current state of the art in language design, operating system architecture, etc. See what's
good, see what's not, really think about the
question `how would we do it all again with
a free hand?'
Obviously in reality, one would have a more complicated situation, and that would be influenced heavily by governments, military, academia, etc. and to a less extent the current kings-of-the-hill in the computer business world (free-market gains would take a lower priority to the `reconstruction').They could take the time (whilst still talking with the bootstrapping people) to think things through, and have direction ideas, etc. by the time the bootstrapping guys need it.
John
John_Chalisque
You wouldn't have the ability to manufacure the complex chips since you'd be stuck to doing it with manual fabs.
John
John_Chalisque
Its actually quite easy. Pop your CD-ROM / DVD into your microwave, turn it on for 4 seconds and viola - instant coaster. Try getting your data off of that puppy.
Secret windows code
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Hopefully the trunk still opens with a key! Put it in the trunk of a '66 Caddy, that'd do ya.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
On the other hand, we may be 20 years away from near-immortality via biotech, heavily dependent on that "evil" technology. What if we just needed to be smart enough to get through a few more years?
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Help Wanted: Scribe
To start immediately, the successful candidate will be able to write legibly and have extensive experience in making paper and ink.
Please apply in person.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
I dunno. This one looks pretty scrambled to me...
Anyone remember that UF cartoon? :)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Ooooh boy. Ease off the guns there, cowboy. You might need to adjust your view of geeks a bit. I think you don't really understand what it takes to be a survivor. Sure hunting and gathering are important. But, you might be surprised at how easy it is to gather food. There are a lot of things more important than barehanded hunting and gathering.
Tool making is more important. Try hunting with your bare hands. Hoe you like lots of lizards, grubs, and bugs mmmmmmmm (actually, prepared correctly, I dig grubs, they are like popcorn, just don't eat the heads). But if you are going to hunt something that moves quickly, you need tools. You need tools to make a good shelter; you need tools to prepare and eat food; you need tools to store and filter water; you need tools to make better tools. I know the processes involved in designing and making tools.
Problem solving is more important. Dealing with a disaster involves quick thinking to solve your problems. What do you do when your main water supply is contaminated? What do you do when a smaller disaster takes out your shelter? I know how to break down big problems into tasks and problem solve.
Communities are more important. Communication between groups of people and cooperation can get you back on your feet faster than if you do it alone. I know how to lead; I know how to follow. I'm a good communicator and know how to ask questions with out an ego in my way; I know how to convey my thoughts and explain them to others.
SO, being a geek isn't all that bad in a survival situation. That and I think most of the geeks I know are outdoors types of people, in spite of what others think. Funny how stereotypes can be the opposite of what the group is really like. I think geeks are from all walks of life, they just have the ability to make tools, problem solve, create communities and communicate openly. These things all would be helpful in a disaster.
-Old Eagle Scout, Troop 55
--Fac Iustum Nec Time-- --Veritas Prevalibit--
Youre assuming that the typical computer geek has no other skills. Wrong, I say! Geeks in general tend to be excellent theorists (something that has always been important, and always will be important). Many geeks also love building things and solving problems.
Id say that geeks would certainly not be the first ones to perish (except perhaps the ones with -really- bad physique).
The "typical" computer geek does not exist! The "geeks" are in fact a range of different types of people that share one common passion. Computers. Some collect, some build, some simply slack off and play games and others document and "clean up".
For all the harm that industrial society has done to the world, maybe it would be a good thing if we were knocked back into the stone age.
C++ uses the same token for assignment, initialisation, specification of default arguments, specification of pure virtual functions, definition of enumerators, and probably a few other things I forgot. Is that so different?
Oddly, all we need to do is go over to www.nitrozac.com to have some ideas! ;-)
Seriously, assume that every transistor on the planet got wiped out. What would be left? First off - the power generation system would probably be broken but repairable. Certainly the generators would be operational, and transmission wires can be repaired. So I'd assume that I can get electricity to my house in some amount of time.
Next - what else would be broken. Maybe my refrigerator - maybe not. Lots of those still around that are pretty simple controllers not using micros. So I might be able to store food in the modern way. Hmm - what about mass communications.
Well -first off, most transmission capabilities would be initially wiped out, but at some time we'd revert to tube technology for the near term. Tube hardware will survive things that transistors don't stand a chance of. I know there is a lot of ham gear from WWII still working fer instance. So I'd imagine that radio would come back up not too long after we have electricity up.
Now - my car wouldn't start because it's all computerized. Only the old gas guzzlers of the 70's would still work. So there would be some transportation, but that would be limited.
These are just some of my thoughts about what would and wouldn't be available. At some point - we start semiconductor manufacturing again....then off we go.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
These questions really have no real relevance, as the event will not occur. "What if all of the ink on all the books in the world magically disappeared? What then?"
Time to work on getting better stories, guys.
You've hit the nail on the head. Everyone would want to just go back to the way things were so that they could get their nice warm spot back.
Remember the old joke? If Cray had built a personal computer that would run at 1THz, have 512GB of RAM, etc, what would be the first thing people would ask? "Can it run Windows?" (In other words, is it x86?)
--
and rosanne barr :)
... and missing.
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
LOL.
:-)
Sorry, Jon, but you try because you've bought into a particularly well-designed meme: that *you* will be saved only if *you* try to save others.
It's a malicious and destructive meme.
Indeed, it makes an excellent model for computer viruses. Imagine receiving an EMail virus that popped up a dialog box stating your two choices: (A) ignore the meme, and it will erase your hard drive; or (B) send the meme to everyone in your addressbook, and it will not erase your hard drive.
Most people would choose (B), not realizing that there is a third choice: reboot the system and erase the virus.
You've fallen hook, line and sinker for option (B), Jon. And the only people you're fooling are those people who don't realize that there's a third option.
The rest of us... well, we're kind of abhorrently amused by the antics of you and your ilk.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Don't forget also, the electrolytic process, which yields you aluminum - light-weight but sturdy metal - it's not titanium, but it would be pretty handy in a lot of things.
Or maybe we all get to see the depth and breadth of my misunderstandings of modern mettalurgy. =:>
If you could get titanium, though, you'd be set.
Good response. However, not all geeks are helpless without their computers. Some of us know how to hunt, fish, grow vegetables and treat injuries.
:)
You can get pretty damn geeky about those subjects as well
Chris
> Something short and pithy
Like everything we've seen from you?
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
An act of god to shake up Bill, and start the computer apocolipse . Enjoy.
SPOON!!!
Yes, but whats that got to do with the price of tea in D'ni?
The perfect companion literature for rebuilding after the 'end of the world'.
The knowledge in here would make it pretty simple (technically, not socially) to bring the dark ages into the Renaissance into the early 20th century over a much shorter period of time.
Well duh!
.. therefore the legacy problem again.
You just build new CD-ROM drive(s) along with the rest of the new computer(s) you need to build in order to get some hardware to run ANY programs on.
Then you can read your CD-ROMs.
Of course, the amusing irony would be, if you want your software on those CD-ROMs to work then you have to make the hardware compatible with what you had before
Arse.
If it's a CD-ROM with important data on it, then that's different of course.
--
Delphis
LOL!
:)
/. holy war so I'll stop now.
Having been born in London and now moved to the USA (the Midwest no less) I had to let you know I agree too with what you say
Not that people around here are crazy bible bashers.. far from it. Many have their faith and that's good for them. Some though (and I'm sure you'll find these people everywhere) say they are religious, they go to church on Sundays but then they seem to FORGET all that they heard or should have picked up from the bible. Things like not being judgemental, not looking down on people if they disagree with you, being considerate of all people and creatures and accepting that people have their own opinions which they are entitled to. Makes me wonder how people like that think they are better people for it.
Still.. this is probably already the start of a
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Delphis
as a whole they are marked by a lack of team-skills
Jeez.. you come off sounding like a real clueless fuckwit, you know that?
Many people who YOU might consider geeks are IT professionals who work in teams DAILY to do their job. Teamwork is a very important skill and many people know that. Just because there may be those that don't know how to work as a team but they are most certainly the MINORITY.
At least get your facts straight before you start sounding off about something.
--
Delphis
How dare you say that about me?!?!?!
You don't know me. It's clear too you didn't read what I posted about being judgemental either.
I believe in spiritualism and doing good by people no matter what they believe in. I am very compassionate to everyone and I object to your insinuations otherwise.
We try because we care
That sounds SO weak and whiney it's amazing and EXACTLY the sort of crap that many 'religious' types spout. 'Because you don't conform to what WE think, you're crap'.
Well fuck you very much.
--
Delphis
I think everybody would feel the effects of an electronic meltdown.
No television. Telephones are fried. No airplanes that fly. Wall Street starts using coconuts as tender. Closer to home: your new stereo with DTS is nuked. You can scoop up your computer with a spoon.
Infrastructure would probably derail. How would you enforce a ban on transporting cows, sheep etc.? Ironically, the people in 'third-world' countries would be the least affected.
Good things: Microsoft would sell only useless stuff and FedEx renames to PonyEx.
--Zarn
>But of course the fuel injection systems in
>automobiles still work fine (all the new GMCs
>and the motorcycle she rides).
FWIW, the motorcycle she rides isn't fuel injected.
It's a Kawasaki ZX-6R.
Computer controlled IGNITION, sure. But not FI.
-LjM
Now what does this give us? K&R is all one needs to recreate C. The Schildt books gives us C++. Funny thing, but my BSD 4 manual more or less describes ext2, the schedular, and virtual memory. I have gate-level designs of all of the standard components, and from these, a design of a (simple) CPU between the 2 digital logic books. Javadoc gives us almost everything except the garbage collector (which Ron Cytron upstairs and down the hall could re-write better in his sleep). And of course the dragon book tells us how to write a compiler.
Now, surprise surprise, my office is probably the WORST place to go in the building to get references for recreating CS/CoE. The conference room across the hall has 10 years of IEEE transactions. It has copies of the 1980's/early 90's Motorolla chip specs (some w/circuit diagrams, others with enough that any grad student should be able to rework it). I know of no fewer than 3 copies of The Art of Computer Programming (Knuth) within walking distance. And I'm not even trying.
So, is anybody willing to donate millions of dollars to make sure that the CS dept. is well guarded against terrorist attacks and the rioting populace? 'cause we got everything you need. Seriously, any university worth it's salt has the paper, monetary, and human resources to restart from scratch. A giant expensive bunker is not necessary.
... and watch the sparks fly.
Its a pretty neat trick.
Just saw Vincent Price in "Last Man On Earth" last night (an Italian horror version of the Matheson book "I Am Legend" which was made into "The Omega Man" in the US).
I've always wondered what I would do in a situation of mass breakdown. With a full population, I think I'd head for a cold, rural area and hope that the climate was warm enough to feed myself but cold and rural enough to keep the parasites away.
If everyone was gone, I think an Urban lifestyle would be great. Loads of canned goods, fuel, medicine and extant housing. There's enough wood in the desks and decorative trim of my office building alone to heat a house in Minnesota for an entire winter. I'd imagine there's enough diesel to provide continuous electricity for the next 20 years.
Perhaps it's one of the major themes to the TV series Dark Angel.
-- Just my $0.02 worth...
I enjoy watching the show too, but it's that basic premise that is one of the weakest links in the plotline imho. Watch out while I scramble the bits on your optical media... please, you have to admit it's just a bit far fetched. But of course the fuel injection systems in automobiles still work fine (all the new GMCs and the motorcycle she rides).
-- Just my $0.02 worth...
The printing press. Simple enough I could probably invent it with the help of a couple good furniture makers, but VERY powerful.
Basic health knowledge. The existance of germs, and what to do about them (soap!).
A here are few gems of knowledge that wouldn't give any immediate benefit, but might set science ahead by hundreds or thousands of years: Chemical elements exist and their mass is stable. All species evolved from others; we have a set of "instructions", two copies per person.
Anyone else want to chime in?
Actually, a fair number of nuclear power plants that are still operational were built without any computer automation at all. I know for a fact that Arkansas Nuclear One can be run without any computers whatsoever, even today, so it wouldn't be too bad off.
I don't know about others, but ANO is a serious piece of work. The reactor core building can survive a dead on hit from a 727 without breaching. It's situated on a lake made by damming the arkansas river (for cooling), but even if every single dam up river simultaneously burst, the PP would be fine because the lower level is water tight and on top of the building is a dock and crane setup. Over-engineered? Maybe, but impressive nonetheless.
Dude, don't be a moron... You waste time saying that they are very different questions, but you don't detail why. His scenario is that there is a causal relationship between the two. The technological disaster causes the clean design plate. Didn't you read the question?
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
we would be right back where we started, however with out the cluginess found in MS products, the closedness of Apple, and the many variants if "Unix".
We would probably also not have any Intel wierdness to deal with - Motorola would become dominant.
The whole topic is stupid. One would think that sociciety didn't exist in the 40's and 50's.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Bad analogy, because it doesn't eliminate current human tech from the equation.
If our goal was leapfrogging them into the information age, we'd simply give them the knowhow and means to build the equipment that is our current standard, warts and all.
...with one important exception. We'd have to be mindful of the fact that they'd eventually realize the cruel joke we've played on them and return, looking for vengeance. That's why I think every piece of tech we give them should have a MacOS-compatible back door designed such that Jeff Goldblum and an Apple Powerbook would be all that is needed to render their entire battle-fleet helpless.
Hmm, someone's been watching a little too much Anime...
Skevin
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
1) Read up on the machine language (we're talking opcodes here) 2) Flash a ROM with an operating system, and arrange the hardware such that it gets loaded at boot (like your BIOS for PCs) 3) In lieu of that (if you can't flash a ROM), set up a bank of DIP switches and manually enter in your minimal OS. 4) Boot and pray that it works. 5) Using your operating system, create an assembler. If you're able, you can flash *this* into a ROM somewhere. If not, you're going to have to go another route. If you have disk access, save it to disk. 6) Continue on up the layers of abstraction. Eventually relegate your ROM to a POST/bootstrapping role and move your OS onto disk. Yes, this is *extremely* simplified. But this is how I'd go about it. It would be quite a bit of work.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
It occurs to me that if something were to happen that could somehow destroy all the computers and storage on a global scale, rebuilding the Information Superhighway would be the least of my concerns. More likely I'd be wondering "Why can't I see the sun?" or even "Great-great-grandpa! Nice to meet you!"
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Yes, but if this was a world calamity, everyone else would be in the same boat. Even then if some large power managed to come up with an invasion force, they'd have to contend with the sheer number of firearms -- and bullets owned by us crazy Americans.
So the danger isn't from without, it's from within -- and that's why we would all have to stick together to make it through. Paraphrasing what Ben Franklin is reputed to have said, "We must all hang together, for surely if we don't we will all be hung apart". Same idea, 225 years later.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Assume that the catastrophe has taken down all of the electronics above ground and not shut down at the time of the cataclysmic event:
- How are you going to fabricate your first chip(s)without the ability to easily create litho masks, burn the masks into silicon, etc.
- Once you've got the chips and motherboard (including all of the support chips, communication chips, memory, display logic -- a huge load), compilers, etc. completed, how do you communicate the requirements, etc. so that others can build other fab plants, etc. without an operational press to print the books, specs, etc.
In order for your information to be dispersed, the equipment required to do so has to survive as well. Ergo the concrete bunker, cave, etc.--Humor Mode On--
Of course, most of the major universities I've visited put at least part of the IT people in cubibles deep underground, don't they? Keep us out of sight, out of mind?
--Humor Mode Off--
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
First we'll work on the communications part, then the message to be communicated.
Assume that any motor vehicle with a chip in it is dead. That still leaves alot of smaller vehicles, horses, etc. to get the word out. For the sake of argument let's also include working rail service, okay? Within a short time, assuming the right word gets out, small communication nets form, even if it is just passing paper hand to hand like the pony express. Then somebody remembers that you can send morse code over bare wires, so we have telegraph capability fairly quickly.
So the whole issue becomes one of controlling mobocracy in the early stages before it can disintegrate a rational society into us vs. them warring factions.
So what is the message? Something like this: "A major catastrophe has happened. The hospitals are still working and we are trying to restore services and transportation as soon as possible and can use all the help me can get. Martial law has been declared to prevent mobocracy, which will be punishable by immediate incarceration and or military response. If anyone among you starts hate-mongering, you will be incarcerated (free speech gets limited under martial law, remember?) Inciting to riot will get you shot... (contains the human beasts).
Now then, for the more civilization oriented folks: "Here are the rules under which we will operate until the basic infrastructure can be rebuilt. Communicate you needs within your small network, and we'll try to meet the most urgent needs amongst the various networks." From there, it is merely a matter of strengthening the trade and communications capabilities amongst and within the networks.
Hmmm. Sounds an awful lot like what happens in the good ole USA, or for that matter, any rationally functioning society after a flood, tornado, earthquake, etc., doesn't it? Which is I have faith that we as a people would survive, and then shortly thereafter, decide to make this world a place in which we all can not only survive, but thrive.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
That assumes the total collapse of the American people as a group willing to help each other rebuild. 'Xcuse me but the last time I checked the good people of the USA are leading the world in charitable contributions.
As to the rest of your points, doctors aren't suddenly going to go stupid -- they still know that vaccines and antibiotics are the front line against disease. One gallon of chlorine bleach will still decontaminate somewhere around a thousand gallons of water, and putting water in a clear, sealed bottle in the sunlight will do the same thing in about 4 hrs.
The farmer still needs to milk his cattle and get crops out, so the real question isn't loss of the IT economy, it's how to survive without the petroleum economy. (biodiesel, btw).
Thus the most important question of all is why I think America would still lead the world, if not economically, then in the self-evident truths that made us who we are: if most of us still believe, that for the most part we're all in this together -- though we may have different skin colors, hold belief(s) in a different God(s) -- that all men, created equal, deserve a chance to not only survive, but thrive.
And whether you, I and enough like minded people keep believing in the American dream fought for in many wars, and not just the economic self-interest first version we're currently wallowing in.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
<RANT MODE>
Okay, let's play slam the geeks. Oblivious to what 90% of the geeks are up to which is not playing quake.
Want a good job pre-apocalypse? Try specializing in medical technology using computers. You know, those little computers that can read if you have a heartbeat, interpret an MRI, let skilled doctors around the world communicate...
Or Telecommunications, letting those doctors communicate. Or CAM (computer aided manufacturing). I could go on for pages on how the silicon God we've created is our servant, and not just a plaything.</RANT MODE>
The original question about rebuilding comes down to knowing how to build the tech. And even if the only thing that survived were a late '90's PC with the appropriate software, CD-ROM knowledge collections, etc. and a printer, we'd still be reable to rebuild everything else faster. So, surprise, surprise, many geeks -- otherwise known as technologists -- are greatly involved in your current reality, and not just on the fringes you attacked.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Michael Chricton's (sp?) "Timeline" is a pretty good book, dealing with some similar concepts, albeit with his typical something is neat, something goes horribly wrong, twist...
However--for argument's sake, let us posit that some disaster has taken out every transistor in the entire world. How long until we're writing our memos in Word again? Not very.
A concerted "bootstrap" effort, with massive infusions of manpower, raw materials and other support from interested parties (and there would be quite a few of those!) could be manufacturing surface-mount transistors inside of six months, assuming all the fabrication machines and other trappings of the electronics industry were at their disposal. Using these, they could build simple logic gates, giving us 1960s-style technology, and the more complicated machinery required to manufacture integrated circuits.
They'd have a bountiful supply of raw materials (silicon wafers, pins, casings and other minutiae) to draw on, since nobody else would be using the stuff!
Starting from ground zero, I'd give it 10 years before we had megaflops machines, and from there a kind of turbo Moore's Law would take effect, artificially accelerated by the fact that we could draw on wealth of completed research into memory architecture, cache design, pipelining, superscalar/speculative/out-of-order execution and a host of other technologies.
Unfortunately, starting over from scratch wouldn't guarantee we do things right this time. Truth is, if you upset humans from equilibrium, they strive to return to exactly where they were, duplicating their successes and failures, advantages and disadvantages.
It's a good bet that with legacy support gone we wouldn't see any x86 or most of the existing OS's. The really good stuff that always dies off because of the legacy issues could finally rise to the top.
Sure, we would have to go through many of the same technological steps as before, but we would be doing it with hindsight - which they say is always 20/20.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Was it in Dr. Strangelove where they qualified that sort of statement with something that amounted to, "...two hundred, if the survivors included a disproportionately large number of lawyers."?
Yep I'd have to agree. sulpher + saltpeter + charcoal anyone?
1. Clone Seymore Cray and have him write an OS and key it in using front-panel switches (in octal -- no assembler needed.)
2. Have RMS write the rest.
Voila! Unix reborn, everything is GPL'd, and it'd be years before MS could recreate Windows.
:)
Look for a series of books by Joel Rosenberg, "Guardians of the Flame". The first book is "The Sleeping Dragon". It is about a group of AD&D players that get pulled into the world their characters were in. It talks a lot about this, how these college students change the world with their knowlege.
At least it's not a terribly grim future they deal with!
"For those of you who have, however, how do you think humanity would recover from a catastrophic loss of all electronic technology? My personal experience is that if something like this were to occur, we would not recover very quickly, but I'm not as optimistic as I was a few years ago. Maybe some of you can paint a better picture."
"Personal experience?" What????? Cliff, you have personal experience in humanity suffering a catastrophic loss of all electronic technology? Huh??? Just what is this "Personal Experience" in, since you've *obviously* misworded yourself...what was your intent? What did you *mean* to say, since you obviously do not have "personal experience" in "humanity [suffering] a catastrophic loss of all electronic technology?" Big "what if" ya got there. Kinda hard to imagine something that would cause global problems of this sort, and would get *everything*, including the stuff that is well protected. In the event that that happened though, I can promise there would be a lot of people in Redmond that would never have a job ever again doing what they once did...I dunno, maybe we'd all start using Eros or BEOS? One also must note that simply frying the electronics doesn't change the fact that there are still hard-copy circut designs for what we now have. That, and the dyes and boards are all set up the current way too. To that extent, PCI would obviously return unchanged, etc. ISA would obviously find itself never to be replaced. And things would be back to normal (albiet slightly improved, though less improved had nothing happened and things progressed normally) in less than a year. Why do I think that? Consider the highway rebuilding in california a couple years back. Necessity breeds efficiency and dedication, not just invention."First, the average user isn't any smarter. How many of you use more than 25% of all the features in Microsoft Word? Most people don't even know how to do a mail merge. Yet, Microsoft insists on putting more and more features into it. Honestly, I can do most of the things that I need to do in Microsoft Word 6.0 for Win95." There are features that you use, then there are features that other people use. Enough people *do* know how to do a mail merge to justify the feature's existence I would say (like, those people who actually need to do it, or support people near those people). Microsoft is, yes, the evil satanic mega-corp that is trying to own the world and take us all to hell...I completely agree...but I can guarrantee you that they have a HUGE R&D department, and that 99.99999 of the features in their products get used enough to justify their being there. The average user doesn't use every single feature on every single KDE tool, either. Some use some, while others use others (and some use Gnome, while others use KDE...). There are some features that are used by more than others. That just means they are more commonly used, not that their value negates the value of a feature only a few people need enough to learn. M$ simply gives people a choice, just like all OS's and all software manufactures do. Feature "bloat" isn't isolated to M$ ya know. With M$ its almost like russian roulette, though...in that all you're doing is taking a gamble that the next thing you do in your M$ environment won't be the thing that gives the BSOD.
What if we lost all possible code? In any digital format, including media?
Whew, thank the gods for all those ThinkGeek shirts.
"The mind is a terrible thing to, um, uh, oh bollocks." -- Me
but they couldn't resist the idea of getting wired again...
I gonna march right down to the nearest computer stor and buy the best and fastest laser printer, a semi-truck load of paper, a messload of toner cartridges. Then i'm gonna start printing the kernel source. Then i'm gonna cat all the man pages to the printer, Then I'm gonna get a windows computer, and open IE, and go to the google web directory. Them i'm gonna click print, and select the "print all linked documents" option, and then OK. (it does really go forever if you let it.)
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Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
Relearn ADA? What are you talking about. My Comp-Sci professor says we'll be able to get plenty of jobs with all the ADA we're learning.
PS: I'm not kidding. My Comp Sci department teaches ADA. And it sucks
PPS: The school also admits that as soon as a certain professor dies - they're changing the curriculum and getting rid of ADA
PPPS: Who would guess that the chair of the CS department is also the Education chair of SIG-ADA. Hmmmm - he even wrote all the demo progs that come with the free linux compiler. Aarrrggghhhh
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
Jon Katz' head would explode as he suddenly realizes he's not capable of doing ANYTHING else.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
... gunpowder.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
How about we re-phrse the core question to get rid of all the other arguments and just get to the point.
If you could take yourself and some smart people and a stack of textbooks on computer science and engineering and travel back in time to 1945 and re-invent the computer revolution from the ground up, how would you go about designing hardware, software, communication, interaction, whatever else?
Now all we have to do is get rid of all the trolls who want to spend all their time arguing about time travel and paradoxes and what-not.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Someone's been watching too much Escape From (Insert Major City Name Here).
I'm afraid I don't have any infos on that, I know that it was considered along binary logic when the first computers where designed, but you might find stuff with searches on "trinary computer" around.
:)
Just think about it : 3^16 is almost as large as 2^32, which mean a 16 bit trinary CPU would have about the same power as a same clock speed 32 bit binary CPU... a 64 bit trinary CPU would just kill
Yep - which, when you reach 32 or 64 "tit" gets a awfull lot more information than with bits :)
I just hope if such a thing happen that people will build CPU/software using trinary logic rather than binary (-1, 0 and 1 state). With the same hardware a trinary system would be way more powerfull than a binary system :)
Actually, you can manage some clever control with strictly analog components -- they are just not very flexible, and tuning is a little tedious.
IIRC, COBOL was designed by Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. The committe happened later. COBOL did what it was supposed to do -- make computing accessible to business. It just didn't have the grace to die gracefully when the time came.
Difficult is a relative thing. Maybe you mean time consuming, but once you are over that hump....
My father has had to rebuild machine tools several times. He could have paid large sums of money for the parts that needed to be replaced, but the machines in question are 70 years old or so, and the parts are not stocked -- thus special order. Therefore, he made them using the broken tools (!). Actually, he made a series of each part, installed it into the machine under repair, them made a better part, reducing the tolerances and slop each time. At the end of the process the rebuilt machine performed better than the original design.
Clearly the machines were not totally broken, and that helped a lot. But for your example of machine threads, I can imagine making wood threads by hand, and using those to mill out (large ) iron or steel threads, gears, etc. and using those to mill still better parts, ad infinitem. Just like we did to start the process in the industrial revolution. The main difference is that we know what works and where we are going. We could probably skip some steps along the way too.
I imagine that the process with computers would be similar, but we might ditch some of the sillier instruction sets, but who knows?
I think it would take at most about 20yrs to rebuild. Start with simple computational machines that utilize transisters as the process of building a transister is quite well known and easily repeated. Now build on that, refine the process until smaller ones are possible.
This also could be a chance to do it right from the beginning. We have already learnt what not to do.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
I know you're just being smarmy, but the U.S. Military actually uses first-person shooters -- even modified version of DOOM -- to train its soldiers, to produce the appropriate mentality.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Real programmers can program FORTRAN in any language.
Telnet, and non anonymous ftp. The new world would be a harsh and desolate landscape... for script kiddies.
--
This is not my sandwich.
Well, if you went back in time, and you changed almost ANYTHING to advance technology beyond what it should have been, all of us would cease to exist, because then you wouldn't have been where you were to go back into mideval times. Sorry.
And a whole bunch of row boats... After all, there wouldn't be and navigation/guidance systems to bring their massive ships here. And certainly no sophisticated weaponry. I'd say a few thousand metric tons of c-4 buoys placed in the waters off the coast of the U.S. would keep them at bay for at least a little while...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
I'm a big fan of the show, but I'm sure no disrespect was meant by the guy's posting the question without a reference to where he got it from... In fact, this is a very common discussion in philosophical circles, and it wasn't like the people that brought us Dark Angel were the first to come up with the thought.
Why do I get the feeling I'm just feeding a troll...
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
I think you may want to look at the triple negative in your sig there.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
The old Larry Niven (an dJerry Pournell?) book "Lucofer's Hammer" is, if I recall, about a comet hitting the earth or some such civilization-crippling disaster. An interesting thread of the story is that one guy gets crates and crates of plastic bags and seals up his whole library of technical books -- and then drops 'em one by one into his septic tank. Knowing that no one will bother them there, the books are safe for later recovery. Also, when the roving gangs of cannibal bikers and religious feaks come to town, there's no precious Alexandrian Library for them to pillage. (It *is* a pretty dated book, and by Larry Niven, after all -- but it's still pretty good. And yeah, it predates "The Postman.")
Someone has never tried exposing his AOL CD's to high intesity microwaves ;-)
bzzzt!
And "The Chrysalids" also by John Wyndam, required reading in highschool...
I can't believe how many people are talking about how geeks wouldn't survive an infrastructure meltdown or battling about "real" programming.<br><br>
The point of the query, I believe, is what might we do differently if we could do it all over.<br><br>
Instead of the apocalypse, then, just assume that all current technology is licensed away from us, forcing us to recreate the electronic environment we're familiar with...(now that's scary...)
There's a wonderful novel by Rudy Rucker called Wetware that is based on just this topic. A phenomenon called chipmold fries all integrated circuits. Since so many common household gadgets already contain them, many of them stop working. Some people's cars also stop (this is set a little further in the future). The inhabitants of the novel come up with a way to infect plastic with a type of mold that can be tweaked and programmed, coming up with integrated circuit replacements that look a little bit like daubs of Silly Putty. Eventually, whole autonomous, intelligent beings grow out of the smart-mold silly putty, who are all a bit like Plastic Man. It's a great, funny, intelligent book, much better than my description here. You can visit Rucker's homepage at http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/ He's a computer science professor at San Jose State, and has some cool cellular automata and little online games & stuff on his site, as well as links to his books.
I reckon Intel first chip after the apocalypse would still be compatible with programs written for an 8086 processor.
While on this whole thing of using computers to make computers. Does Intel use their own pentium chips to run their chip making machines? I'm sure those machines don't need MMX or anything, so they probably step down to microcontrollers, but the question still stands...
:wq
It already exists, industrial hemp. Low to no THC, makes great paper, rope, decent cloth, just one problem, it's been illegalized along with drug grade marijuana for the convenience of the drug warriors in the US.
DB
for those of you that don't keep up: aftery2k.
Nitrozac is a babe.
If all semiconductors were fried I guess we'd start using tubes (valves for you blokes on the other side of the pond) again. Can't you just imagine multivac again? Also start threading cores again. Now where can I get me a Collins S line cheap, just in case?
>>The new TV show Dark Angel is post-EMP apocalyse.
Yeah well, but quite frankly Dark Angel still looks very much like today to me.
Geez, one of the characters even has an Apple Cube standing on his desk.
Just to have some Graphitti on the Wall doesn't make it really Post Holocaust.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
We will revert back to computers that you can fix with a handful of transistors, resistors, and wire. Old computers are MUCH more robust than their modern counterparts, with discrete components and (mostly) off the shelf construction. Usually the only integrated component is the processor itself. Alternativly, I've got this '70s book that describes how to make a "Working Digital Computer" using paperclips, lamps, and cardboard toilet tissue rolls...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
There are better ways to regain perspective than massive destruction and loss of life and quality of life.
Just a thought.
+++ATH0
My first suggestion (and it's great beacuse it applies to so many "what if we had to redo _____ from scratch?" type questions.)....
First we kill all the lawyers.
No sig.
you need to legalize guns then. At least I have a fighting chance against muggers.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Sure, some people would die, and things would be annoying for a while, but it would probably only put humanity aback 50 years or so.
Why?
Because the people who built the stuff in the first place would still be here. Doing something you already KNOW you can do is not a big barrier.
-Jeff
The hit that American infrastructure would take would be enormous. No doctors wouldn't forget about vaccines and antibiotics. But where will they obtain them? I doubt that most doctors would be able to manufacture them.
Water would be an incredibly scarce resource. Most people in America lack the resources to purify it. If just the knowledge of how to do it.
Martial law is a logical reaction to such a disaster. I just wonder how the fact that the nation is under martial law would be communicated. Petroleum products would be scarce almost immediately. There may be thousands of gallons at the gas station, but accessing it will be problematic. But I am certain someone could rig up a pump to retrieve it. Just try rationing it without the deterrent use of force.
Ideology quickly succumbs to necessity. The first few weeks would be hell. I have no doubt that we could rebuild. There would still be text books.
I would hope that we would rebuild America along CONSTITUTIONAL lines and abandon so much of the crap that has been added to the federal government. Perhaps a few years without large government and industry would be enough to wake America from its stupor. One can always hold out hope.
Hmm, the loss of computers would devastate the world. Loss of financial records would wipe out the economy, setting us back to the optimistic state of last months bank statement. There would be virtually no travel - how long has it been since you've seen a gas pump that didn't rely on electronics? No communication save that of the old method off letters. Not that letters would be quick, no travel right.
Suddenly guns, bullets, food and water would become the most valuable commodities. We'd be at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Loss of computers in would be one of the most devastating disasters to the advanced world. The people would still be around, but life would majorly suck. The first thing we'd have to do is keep the world fed and in potable water. We'd see a remarkable decline in life expectancy. Disease and famine would wipe out lots of people in the first few years.
Welcome to the Neo-Dark Ages.
Hmm, maybe time to get an older vehicle, a reloading bench and some big caliber weapons. Maybe Montana isn't so bad after all...
You ever put a cdrom in a microwave. its pretty scrambeled after about 2 seconds.
The typical *nix sysadmin or Perl hacker has a very specialised set of skills that only counts within the narrow environment in which they are confortable operating in.
Really?
See Chairman Mao as an example of the 'elite' 'functioning' outside their training.
Computing is not the first priority in this situation, nor is it even in the top ten.
Given the lack of electricity, the food demand VS food supply issues from such a destruction of the world technology, etc la, yes quake-playing computers would be low on the list.
Want more about this: Set your browsers back to 1998-1999 and read up about the Y2K "bug". Then s/Y2K Bug/some other bug/g
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
How about you try helping yourself out for a change there in your third world country instead of wishing ill on those who have pulled themselves up from our uncivilized origins?
This hypohetical situation would be my dream come true. I'm waiting for the day all computers cease to operate and I can finally get away from them. -FM
Busy, busy, busy...
Wouldn't that be Y2.1K?
Well, the farmers would be in luck. Maybe they'd be able to get decent prices, instead of relying on gov't subsidy to survive. Of course, most farmers have been forced to specialize to be profitable, so even they are heavily reliant on the infrastructure. Used to be that a farmer had several kinds of animals and grew at least three kinds of grain so he could still make it if one of these failed. Now if the infrastructure collapsed, even the farmers might not make it.
Constitutionally Correct
Oops, sorry! The phrasing of my original post did make it sound like education was grunt labor, didn't it? That wasn't what I intended.
Constitutionally Correct
Heck, if I even went back one hundred years in time, my skills would be worthless. Here's what I figure I could do.
Pretty sad to think that many of us have no practical skills that would help us survive. We'd be reduced to grunt labor. The last century has seen so many tech advances that have forced us to specialize. Going back 200, 300, or 1000 years wouldn't be tremendously different than just 100.
This makes me feel like I'm reading _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_ again.
Constitutionally Correct
After the panic and stock market crash due to the loss of technology, we would start over.
;)
:)
:)
I am assuming that we wouldn't lose the knowledge of making chips, that our electrical engineers will still have the knowledge in their heads on 32 bit CPU designs, etc. Give it a few years until a few factories are build, and the first CPUs start coming off the assembly lines.
The first OS, will most likely be open sourced, no commercial OS can be made that fast. Open sourced OSes will be made first because more people are working on it. Consider a reworking of OpenBSD or Linux before a MS-DOS, MacOS, or even Windows is recreated.
I'd imagine that Apple would scap the MacOS 8.X and 9.X designs for a BSD Unix based OS like OSX was. No need to worry about "Classic" mode because all the old programs got fried in the "Zero Event Flash" or whatever. Motorola, IBM, and Apple will try to reinvent the PowerPC chip.
Intel will no doubt skip over the 386, 486, Pentium, and Pentium Pro series and just try to reinvent the Celeron and Pentium III/4 chips.
Microsoft will most likely avoid reinventing MS-DOS and Windows 3.X and Windows 95/98/ME and just try to make a Windows 2000/XP type OS.
My gosh, what about the MP3 formats? A new format would have to be made! I guess all those Audio CDs are toast as well? Have to recreate them from sheet music. Say Goodbye to Elvis and Beatles recordings! It would also be a world without music until we could recreate it.
Hmm, maybe the recreated versions of OS/2, BeOS, Linux, OpenBSD, and Mac OSX will sell better than the recreated Windows 2000/XP software?
I'll miss all the old video game consoles, fried beyond playability. Nintendo and Sony will rush to get the first recreated video game console, and maybe Sega would be back in the game with a new console of theirs?
Even the digital watches would be fried! Nooooooooooo! Even the calculators, microwave ovens, TV sets, aaarrrggghhh! All the consumer electrics would be toast. Darn you, darn you all, you manics, you blew it all up!
If all else fails and we cannot recreate technology, we can always join the Amish and raise up barns at 3am in the morning!
Maybe we can go back to the old vacuum tubes and start building computers from that? Would also make nice space heaters from the tubes! Just like in the AfterY2K Comic.
This is very true, but most geeks have other skills as well. Mostly some sort of orginization. The problem is that most of the slashdot people don't understand what you're saying and will probably try to get names and addresses out of their palm pilot before planting the next crop of food and then they'll die.
--
Free Mac Mini
don't eat spicy foods before bed
so lets say someething catastrophic does occur and all of our electronics were damaged..we would be plunged into a massive panic.. all the money and information lost would plunge us into a dark ages of sorts.. there would be ,ass rioting..and not from who you think
buisness men who lost all their life savings...bill gates would go insane..and everyone who spent half their live in front of a computer would go insane, and run to the streets..and begin to destroy anything and everything..
while i dont think it would be impossible to recover..i think it would take quite a while..
all legacy systems would be gone..the net would be built on optic fiber..and the first OS avaliable would be linux..
and you wouldnt have script kiddies running around
the net screwing everything up..for a while atleast...
and i wouldnt have to contend with banners..for a while..
after the tech dark ages..it would become a utopia for the computer literate...
What about M$? They can selectively remove all electronics completely from the Earth if they "remain in power" for a couple of years. (Enough years to get into calculators and microwaves and vehicles, etc.) They made a wasteland of a good database and called it SQL Server, killed other competition in like manner, and are now working on copy control. Soon, they'll have automated all of my work and I won't be licensed to do any because copying from RAM to the HDD is a crime and because the darn wizard answers its own questions and does my job for me in the way *it* "thinks" best.
/rant
...I don't have enough faith to believe in the "big bang"...
I bet there'd me less mistakes on the way up though. Intel wouldn't have made the 20 bit bus, used little endian, so on, so forth.
gov't lackey here. We're about as 'paperless' as any other large corporation. Almost everything is electronic to start, but sooooo many people won't even read it till it's printed out. I know folks that print every email, regardless of content. Where does it go after they read it? The trash of course!
We just had to produce several years worth of documentation for the EPA, how was it stored? On paper. How did the EPA want it? On paper. 30 Boxes of paperwork photocopied......sheesh
-Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
Early on, an encoded date wasn't a serious option; you had to store the date you wanted as you wanted it--converting a binary digit to two decimal digits still had noticable costs.
:-)
While I buy your argument that it could be more work for whoever punches the cards, the increase in workload for the computer is neglectible: it's just some shifts and a binary and -- operations which where cheap in CPU time ever since, because they're easy to build in hardware.
And it wouldn't take a huge amount in resources to just prepend "19" to all two-digit dates on punch cards. This way, the full year would be stored efficiently and your card puncher could avoid building calluses
Furthermore the two-digit year bug wasn't invented to save memory in the first place - it is much older. Probably it stemmed from laziness when scribbling dates on paper. The German ID cards *still* have two-digit years printed on them, and I'm pretty sure that's not because they want to save a few drops of ink.
Two-year digits are just laziness, and nothing else. Let's try not to glorify it as the idea of some kind of genius, okay?
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
Windows can withstand ANYTHING -- so 'rebooting the world' would not be possible.
---------------
Sig
abbr.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
".....Animals will have to be Bred and Slaughtered...." -Dr StrangeLove From "Doctor Stranglove, or How I stop worrying and learned to love the Bomb"
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
I know most of the berries and roots in the SE US that are edible. I can make a fishnet from trees (really). I am well armed (Winchester Model 70 .270 and 30.06, various .22s, 1 handgun) plus have *lots* of ammunition. Oddly enough, there are several like me in my profession (Unix admin). I guess the mindsets are similar.
The bible was wrong. It was supposed to be:
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
where all "technology" is basically scrap, but there is not other widespread problems (radiation illnesses, climatic disasters, war, mutant Natalie Portmans running around), I think we would be pretty pooched in some regrards. When you think of it, most tech is based on older tech...we would have to start from square one. If *all* tech is blown, we are back to the purely industrial age, machanic/hydraulics and the likes, but without any electronics to even control them! I mean how could you even manufacture chips without technology? It is not merely and industrial process...from one view point, it would be cool, to start wit yha clean slate, if the hardware gods had some decent written notes, it would take a while to get back up to speed, but with cleaner implmentations...on the other hand, Bill Gates and Co$ would be SOL...nothing to rip off and call their own.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Let's hope that it doesn't come to this! I've thought about this question before, and it's one that you would just hate to have to consider. (Like trying imagine what it means for time to be infinite.)
If it ever does come to that, I don't think I want to be around. Having NO technology remaining would make it horribly difficult to begin again. There could certainly be some better design decisions made with no need for legacy support, but imagine all of the prerequisites to building even the simplest TTL package! Egads.
Having lived and worked in Mali, Burkina Faso, Sengal, the Ivory Coast and Kenya, I can tell you that this is not the case regarding telephones. Even the most far-flung reaches of the Ivory Coast are accessible by telephones that use extremely tall directional antennas to relay very scratchy but perfectly usable telephone connections to each other, to the capital and abroad.
Even in these countries, people live not very far from telephones, and understand how to use them even if many of them are barely literate. The problem is that they don't really know anyone far enough away to make it worth their while to contact them, and those who leave their communities to go to the cities rarely try to get in touch whilst they are away because the although the telephone is there, the culture of the telephone hasn't really penetrated their daily lives.
In the heart of the Marrakech Souk, between a shop selling dead fried unidentifiable animal and another selling sandals, you can find an Internet Cafe, and the same is true of almost all densely populated areas in Africa, from Ouagadougou to Bamako.
Now if you're talking about a continent other than Africa - I have no idea.
Salocin.com
For starters, the last 5 years Ive been putting in college will be a total waste. My resume would look totally blank except for my name and a non-existant degree. Americans would be totally screwed as they can bother Saddam no longer. China or India will rule the world because it makes no difference to most of the people living there!
--> Your Wisecrack Here
Think back to great hacker moments like the creation of the "hackintosh" when some mac owners wanted to be able to use IDE drives in thier mac computers. Then remember back to the KIM computer that had any number of hacks from the creation of a tape drive interface for the computer to the creation of a TV display interface.
I think the skills to take an object and transform it to your will are vastly useful. Working directly with electronics may not be important in the hypothetical world of this article, but I know that most of my geek friends also hack thier cars and bicycles and bond fires to get them to do any number of crazy things. That skill and drive and desire will make them useful in the fully restarted world.
I mean really, can you classify the great inventors of the last century as anything other than geeks and hackers? I think that the true spirit is being lost in the .com era of making billions on ideas that never pan out. *sigh* Tis life.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
That's very generous of you... :-) But which language are you going to write it in? You could write it in assembly, but there is no assembler to assemble it.
Since real programmers write in machine code, I guess I'll volunteer to write the first assembler, entirely in hexadecimal. Now all we need is someone willing to re-instate a computer that uses vaccuum tubes or relays.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
microsoft would be gone. bill gates would have no money. it would be a golden age for open source as everybody banded together to start from the beginning again (after the initial anarchy).
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
I think the answer is self regenarating equipment or hardware that can rebuild itself.
cybermalandro
It`d still scramble the firmware in your cdrom drive!
We've got hundreds of computers circling the earth, and a few others even further than that. All we need is a Ham radio or something to call them and tell them to come back home, and we can rebuild our infrastructure around those.
Cliff edited out the important (to me) part of my question. Exactly how would we go about re-creating computers. Assuming we had to start with simple devices (transistors, diodes, etc.), what would be the most efficient way to create the first working computers and software, and then use those to create the next generation of computers and software, and so on until we get "useful" stuff again?
It sounds like you've been reading After Y2K. We're not reinventing the wheel here. The concepts will be the same and we're got an awful lot on paper. This isn't an absolute loss of all knowledge, just a medium on which it is stored.
"As things are now, it is pretty easy to develop software for new hardware platforms. Just write a cross-compiler on an existing platform, and then copy the binary to the new system."
No offense, but this person must have never had to move software from one hardware platform to another. If he had he would realize that it isn't easy. Anyone whose ever gone from a PC to a mini-computer to a mainframe knows that isn't the case. IT'S A PAIN IN THE ASS! You don't just take your source code from one machine and recompile it on another machine. It's doesn't work that way in the real world. In the real world the differences between different hardware platforms can be immense.
Those out there who have worked in the corporate world and had experience with these big systems, I feel your pain.
how the humanity is going to recover from the Microsoft (and microsoft drainbrained spawns) invasion that is going thru???
I wouldn't hold that book up to high. someone will shoot you and burn it for heat. ;)
;)
Remember you would have to start from the ground up. all current manufaturing plants would be gone, as well as all the tools that built them. This means the first transistor might be made out of glass(tubes)! How many people do you know that can blow glass? or make a filliment? Do you know how to make wire? how many people know how to make electricity? ALL out current generating plants would come to a halt. I would suggest moving away from any nuclear plant immediatly.
You do bring up a good point in that once we got the first generation of components built, we would know exactly what to do to get the second generation.
You would be screwed be cause I would patent transistor technology with the new governments patent office. I'm not greedy, I only want 1 penny per transistor
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Our current military is not large enough to ennact a country wide martial law.
Many peope will use this event as an opportunity to "get theirs".
the airforce and navy would be nearly gone, there specialties rely heavily on technology. SAC/MAC/TAC missions would be un-achievable.
the army and marines would be only used near military bases.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How about rebuilding practically *all* of technology? Consider having a bunch of people, placing them on another planet with an environemt like ours that was never inhabited before. How would they recreate our technology?
It always fascinated me that human beings developed on this planet with nothing but their natural environment and were able to produce all that we see around us. I'd love to see a technological timeline beginning from when humans developed that shows when what piece of technology was invented and how certain technologies were used to build upon to create other technologies.
-Tyler
The wheel is overrated. Fire is the shit!
Happy people make bad consumers.
It doesn't take a CS grad to do my job. Not even close. But the programming I do in a day (scripted data access in ASP) is far beyond the other 90 percent of the population.
So why should we take up a CS grad's time, who can make a compiler from scratch, when me and my knowledge of VBScript get me by just fine? Leave the important work to them.
I bet you don't like word processors either. But I ask, why take up a graphic designer's time when a simple program can do an acceptable job of formatting text?
Point is, the simpler the task is to accomplish, the more people can get it done and the more efficiently resources are utilized. Things get done when it's easier.
So I could care less about your disdain. As long as my job gets accomplished, that's all that matters.
I could scramble it by snapping it in two.
somehow, i doubt that we'd end up with radically different processors.
on one hand, if everything electronic were zapped, we would have a chance at a fresh start, ignore all the mistakes, blind alleys and red herrings that have affected chip design in the last 50 years but...
there is still an enourmous body of knowledge and resources that has been built up around programming things like x86 processors and all the programming languages everyone has learned to hate. not to mention all the software on cd that would not get zapped by a big electromagnetic pulse. somehow, i think there would be a lot of resistance to the idea that all these resources should be abandoned in favor of completely new, albeit streamlined, designs.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
We are doing this exact thing in After Y2K, our comic. :)
...we just came off of the Tubes Period, and will be moving into a new Era soon.
;)
/. homepage ;-)
In the comic, an apocolyptic Y2K bug occurred, and after a series of spectacular cartoon universe events, our characters are in the process of re-building their society.
In our version, the hysterical process of re-building is mirroring the actual historical development somewhat ,
But you probably know all this already, since you're a fan.
Heh, we still haven't decided if Cmdr Taco and Hemos have survived the Bluish Blast though, especially since they removed our link off the
--- I'd love to go out with you, but I have to study for a Turing test.
Great, The world goes down with a horendous crash and all we have left are Norad's basment warming antiques. Grab those old texts - you've got to re-learn ADA.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President
Notice I said "was" self-sustaining. Now the community I'm referring to is a center of poverty in one of the poorest states in the U.S. Everyone there drives at least 20 miles to work at low paying jobs to put gas in their gas-guzzling cars so they can drive 40 miles to buy groceries. This is far from the self-sustaining community it was 80 years ago, when each family would make one trip a year, if even that, to the nearest city.
But if civilization were to suddenly come to an end, such a community could possibly form again. With the help of some "geeks"- technically minded people, some technology could be salvaged for the benefit of the community. It would not be an easy life, but I think we could survive. This was my point.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Perhaps I should add that all my friends and I grew up in a very rural area. We all worked on farms, our families grew their own food to an extent. The area we lived in was a self-sustaining community 80 years ago. I never claimed to be a genius (although I would say that some of my friends are). But compared to someone of our same technical skills who grew up in the suburbs, I would say we have more skills that would benefit our survival. It would not be an easy life, but I stand by my claim that as a community we would prosper.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
I have discussed these possible "end of civilization" senarios with my geek friends on numerous occasions. We concluded that computers were far from the top of are list of priorities. We also found that we possess numerous valuable skills and together we stand a good chance at surviving and prospering in a post-apocalyptic world. With our combined skills we could rebuild automobiles, distill ethonol for fuel, generate electricity from wind and water, forge our tools and weapons from scrap metal, make gunpowder, grow our own crops. We could build a self-sustaining community with nearly all the modern convieniences.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
There's a problem with the idea a lot of people seem to have: that if there was a sudden technological "rewind", the people that died from not being able to adapt to the new (old?) lifestyle would be the "useless" population, (someone mentioned cleaning up the currant gene pool?) and that technology would be able to zap back into gear in a few years thanks to loads of newly-bored IT workers eager to bring humanity back up to speed.
Take your average IT worker, nay, take your average American and your average uneducated, never-seen-an-electronic-device third-worlder, make all technology involving IC chips (and magnetic media, and optical, and etc.) unavailable to them. Who will survive past the first month?
Now maybe you enjoyed Cast Away, but that doesn't mean it was all that realistic. The average person accustomed to the magic, I mean come on, the IC is a pretty amazing thing, of the Information Age (TM) doesn't know SQUAT about wilderness survival.
And that's what the world would be. A wilderness. No lights, no heat, no cars, no credit cards, no cash registers, no police dispatches, no fire trucks, no 911. We had a 7-day blackout in my town (Syracuse, NY) a few years back, and there were some notable lootings, including a gun store. Stores emptyed or were sometimes looted if they didn't stay open. There was still food, there were still functional automobiles, etc, and people still seemed to think that it was a good idea to prepare for the end of the world. A complete electronic wipe, especially on a worldwide scale, would no doubt have disasterous social consequences.
Remember Arthur Dent in Mostly Harmless? He figured he was from a pretty high-tech place (the Earth, R.I.P.), so he assumed he could get a job doing something. Through when it came down to it, all he really knew how to create were sandwiches. Sure you can write a friggin amazing graphics engine, Mr. Carmack, but can you catch rabbits using a snare?
So if there was an infocalypse, the population that would probably die off first would be the people that wouldn't have any applicable skills in that new environment. The annoying red-neck who cuts you off with a deer strapped to his hood might do just fine.
Sorry if the above is confusing, I'm a lousy self-proof-reader.
Green-voting, republican-registered, socialist-libertarian.
I don't think you would need a scenario catastrophic enough to destroy all computers and all life. Just one large enough to destroy a significant amount of the existing manufacturing/programming infrastructure. For example, a nearby neutron star emits a burst of gamma radiation that blasts the Pacific Rim - U.S. Pacific coast, Tiawan, Singapore, Japan, etc. That could probably effectively destroy enough to make it necessary to rebuild the infrastructure, and at that point, decide to make some significant changes. The first being all programming, html, etc. are based on a World Standard, in case this kind of catastrophy happens again, it will be easier to recover from.
I hate rotating media. We could have so many other methods of storing data if only we'd drop this stupid legacy thing Edison laid on us. We're all burning like crazy to these CD-Rs knowing full-well that they have like zero shelf life in the long term. What are we going to copy it all to and how annoying will that process be!?!?!? Not everything Edison was the genius of the light bulb -- and it's time to pick something better than that relic too.
Five hundred years ago, you could pick up red rocks, smelt them, and oh look, Iron. Not now a days.
Whereas now, all we have to do is go down to the local scrap heap, or if push comes to shove, dig up some landfills. Those resources haven't gone away, they've just been redeposited. Copper was the first metal to be mined, since it was available in surface rocks; now, there's no more surface deposits, but there sure are a lot of old pennies lying around! (and I for one wouldn't shed a tear at having to melt them all down and do away with them.)
The only resource that would really be an issue is energy, and we've got plenty of that as long as you don't mind wrecking the environment (even more). The rest of the problem lies in making useful things from the resources we have. That is where our dependence on manufacturing technologies comes into play.
It would start with the reconstruction of the first simple electronic appliances like telegraphs and telephones, then progress to IC's and such, and ultimately, one system will end up building the next one, and so forth until we get back to where we are today. We hopefully have documented to some extent how to reconstruct these simple systems (go to your local university's engineering library for multitudes of info), so I'm not worried too much about the rebuilding of legacy items. Recent technological advances may be more difficult to reconstruct due to the proprietary nature of many new hardwares and softwares, but we ought to be able to persevere.
The hardest part will be getting people to readjust to a "pioneer" style of life while things get rebuilt. Those that are severely technology dependant will suffer the most, those that actually do things that don't involve computers, electricity, etc, will adapt the best. We'd have a brief return to an agarian-based economy, but our own knowledge of agriculture is so far advanced from say even 50-100 years ago so we'd probably be alright. The big cities would have a major problem though since most are heavily technology dependant, and being trapped in NYC in this situation is not a place I'd like to be.
Overall, we'd suffer a little, possibly reintroduce a long-needed round of Darwinism to our species, and eventually we'd get back to prosperity. Europe did it following the fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages, and they didn't have one iota of the knowledge that we possess today. We'll be ok.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
As long as we have Larry (Wall) and Linus
(Torvalds), I think we'd be just fine.
Seriously, we know what can be done, and (hopefully) what shouldn't be. So it would be much easier. Practically, it wouldn't take very long.
On the other hand you might have lots of Microsoft's and such creating one-of's. Think BETA/VHS/LaserDisc.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Looks like the same post to me.
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I may finally be able to get out of debt!
To address your question more seriously, it really depends on how much of the technological infrastructure is eliminated -- if one could make copper wire and small magnets, making a simple magetic core memory wouldn't be too tough.
Really, the way to answer the question is to figure out the actual historical path to chip production and prune the dead-ends, then figuring out how long it would take to follow that path. Unfortunately, I have a very cursory knowledge of this area of the history of technology. I would think that there would be a number of surprising necessary precursors -- for instance, I believe a variety of organic halogen compounds are used in chip production and I have no idea how technologically intensive production of these compounds is.
This would be a good question for that guy who does the "Connections" TV specials and Sci Am columns (James Burke?)
As far the question of what we would do differently: on the OS front, maybe just go straight to BeOS.
1. Put Bill Gates in a rocket
Keep in mind that without computers we'd have a heck of a time getting a rocket to Pluto, and he'd probably just paint his name on the side of the rocket and convince the Plutonians that he "innovated" it. Our best bet would be to tie a few dozen now-defunct computers to him (make them Macs to really piss him off), and toss him into Puget Sound.
Also: what would become of SETI@Home? Would they just ask us to spend our idle minutes squinting at the sky?
But if we're starting from scratch, it would be very difficult to initially build hardware that could even take advantage of such things as firewire, IPv6, etc. I think Sponsor's right: we would have to start from scratch. Granted, some things would be obvious from the beginning, and progress would be much faster.
As for whether we would eventually end up with better stuff: perhaps, but not significantly so. Consider: we've been building hardware, software, etc for a while now. If we were to suddenly find ourselves "back at square one" as it were, it wouldn't exactly be the time for experimentation. Real world pressures would force us to go with what we know, i.e. existing ideas/technologies/etc.
No, he's saying that it would be impossible to design/manufacture a modern computer without the help of existing computers.
cool old B&W movie.
We (USA) could mobilize again pretty quickly. Marshall law for awhile (jeeps & guns still work).
Think of all the new orders for equipment!! And all the overtime getting back up again !!!
No more recession!!
NASDAQ finally over 4000 !!!
-reid
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
How is everyone going to find out that this event even happened? All forms of communications will be toast as well.
How about "brainf*ck"? Plain and simple language.
*Never* say you are sorry for quoting Neal. :)
The above has nothing to do with the fact that I just finished reading Cryptonomicon for the 5th time either.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
... I'd have no problem with it. It's *twitch* not like I'm *twitch* addicted to my computer or anything... *twitch twitch*
That's $1.6 trillion
I think the direct cause of the loss of the technology (as well as the time spent in luddite-ville) would have a definite effect on the speed and method of re-development.
If it was a "instant" catastrophe that caused the loss, I would like to think that the people in the world best suited to redesign and rebuild the technlogy base would commit themselves to the critical systems first. Health care, transport, communications, certain infrastructure.
The big problem I see is with the vast majority of the population ignorant of anything beyond how to shut down before turning off their machine. After critical systems have been restored, the work on revenue generating tech can begin. I have a hard time believeing that the industry giants will tolerate anything but the minimum amount of time required to become re-operational (This will be further exascerbated by the now-evident feeling of "being the first x-business back in operation".)
In short, if that is possible, I feel our rush to re-tech the world will overshadow our desire to redesign it past our old limitations. Certainly some innovations will become evident but they will primarily focus on tech that is purpose built to quickly re-equip (tech wise) the world.
An interesting thought. Would Microsoft be able to re-establish their dominance? I have often thought that their market share is due to an exisiting install base.
For our USian readers, "top rugby-playing physical condition" means "I have a beer belly"
You would not want to mess with me unless you had a gun (or possibly a crossbow or syringe filled with HIV infected blood (the weapon of choice among muggers here in england))
Bring it on, you fat cunt. The fact that you swallow tabloid stories about "syringes full of HIV infected blood" gives absolutely every reader a crystal clear indication of how much real life experience of violence you have. Unless it involves sticking your head between a prefect's legs, or playing jolly knob games in the showers, you're all talk.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
BTW, I'm white, and european, so this isn't exactly a flame.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Just how many "catastrophic loss[es] of all electronic technology" have you experienced, Cliff?
--
He's right, you know, assuming you'd have to reinvent the wheel of technology.
We could run out of energy, if we were to either freeze or boil the planet, but nobody would really care about technology. A nuclear event, asteroid impact, or whatever, would also result in nobody caring. Large fires, global flooding or drying, major earthquakes and volcanoes, virus outbreaks, etc., same problem -- nobody cares, nobody can work on the technology.
About the only "cataclysm" that could do all this without wiping out all of humanity would be a bunch of extreme EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) blasts, but those would have to be world-wide. All chips/IC's are pretty much useless, at this point. Sure, you could start (expensively) manufacturing radiation-hardened chips, but then you'd need electrical power in the first place. Restore the power, shield everything (probably underground), and you can compute. Fiber optics would work, as long as the repeaters, hubs, switches, routers, and all other IC-based technology were underground and powered-up.
Just about any other event would wipe out humanity, so we wouldn't be waxing philosophical on this point.
As far as radios/communications, you'd need A) electrical power and B) older tube-type shortwave radios, since most solid state and almost all IC radios would be completely useless, especially mobile phones. Major EMP could make shortwave communications impossible, as well, of course....
The event described probably won't happen without major loss of human life -- chip makers and software engineers included.
Thus, the idea of reinventing technology is a better one. The question should have been, "If you were given a blank slate and could start over again, learning from past mistakes and being able to try new ideas, given unlimited resources, what would/could be different about technology, from software to hardware to user interface." Or, just imagine what kind of technology an alien world might have developed....
Just watch Star Trek, Star Wars, the Sci-Fi channel, etc., for more ideas, here.
It was great... watching coverage on TV of the earthquake that hit us Seattle kids today, they have footage of a Microsoft presenter getting his world rocked. I couldn't stop laughing.
Re-computerizing the world would be nearly impossible, because Rambus would tie everything up in court for years claming they have the patents to it all!!!
You ever put a cdrom in a microwave. its pretty scrambeled after about 2 seconds.
Ever put a human or other animal in a microwave? I dare say they'd be pretty scrambled too.
-Dorsey
-Dorsey
If you can't beat them, exploit them. *Then* beat them... -Milk & Cheese
I don't necessarily agree with this statement, but nowhere does he imply that 75% of the non-noticing world plus 1% of the computer users equal the worlds population.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Only prototypes need be built. We don't have to mass-produce a series of Babbage engines, then vacuum-tube colossi, then generation after generation of PCs. We would need only a few older computers in order to develop newer ones.
It wouldn't work that way. People usually want to do things better the second time. That would result in major screw-ups because some "better ways" don't translate as nicely to reality as they are expected to do. We would end up in a development situation so different from every point in history that "just repeating history" would be impossible. Sure, some major mistakes would not be repeated, but others would be made. Developers would try to skip evolutionary steps and slip. Small mutations result in better adapted species, big mutations result in extinct species. And of course some non-developers would argue that waiting for the "final thing" would take too long - so demand for intermediate products would be there.
The second try would be faster, but not that much faster. You are underestimating chaos.
if printed source code was all that remained (in some weird freak case where all cd data was destroyed (maybe an electromagnetic blast, followed by hordes of mutant rats that eat silvery coated plastic), one thing would be for certain: there would be a lot more free software users!
--
--
[root@world root] reboot
Message from root on tty1:
Warning! World going down for reboot NOW!
What you are describing is the complete erasure, if you will, of all hardware and digital media.
What about this? *holds up his "Programming Perl" book*
As much as today is a computerized world, we have thousands and thousands of dead tree publications around the world describing the silicon technology of the past decades. IF what you describe were to happen, would we redesign everything? I think not. We'd just go down to the good ol' RFC repository, dig out the good ol' Intel chip references, and quickly climb our way back up the tech ladder. We wouldn't HAVE to start from the ground up, except in manufacturing. Ok, so we might end up with more efficent manufacturing.
You have to remember that people are lazy. Some might go about designing better systems, but most will just turn to the books, the knowledge in their head, and rebuild. You'd have to wipe every engineer's, every programer's, mind, and every book on the topic on the face of the earth, clean, to truly have an effect such as you speak of.
Akardam Out
The Mattel Aquarius, now that was a system. I still have two!
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Will
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
You didn't even answer the man's question. All you did was rant about how geeks wouldn't have a spot in a post-apocolyptic world.
Ryan "the Moped" Runge
Exactly.
Ryan "the Moped" Runge
I pretty much agree with most of what's been said. It would be very hard to start over, we'd have to rebuilt all the factories that use electronics to make our electronics (ie. chip fabbing plants). I think it would take us more than a few years to spring back from that. As it takes Intel and AMD a few months to get ready to produce a new chip, and that's with the current technology that we have. Anyhow, just my $.02
-----
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
Would the USPTO get scrambled too? and would the DMCA cease to exist? If not, recomputerizing the world would be a real mess.
-John
This is just another typical geek response to the end of the world scenario. "But how would be get our computers back" the geek wails, utterly oblivious to the fact that in any kind of realistic scenario that could destroy all of the computing power in the world, people would be more concerned about surviving than being able to play Quake deathmatches.
One question that I've thought about is "If the end of the world was coming, what good would you do?". Some people would be leaders, some would have the skills to grow food or hunt whilst doctors could help the injured.
But geeks? They would be the first ones to perish.
The typical *nix sysadmin or Perl hacker has a very specialised set of skills that only counts within the narrow environment in which they are confortable operating in. Take that environment away, and said hacker is like a fish out of water. And with the vast lack of social skills they possess, they can't even integrate into the hunter-gatherer groups of the post-apocolyptic world.
Computing is not the first priority in this situation, nor is it even in the top ten. Asking this question shows nothing other than how tenuous the grasp of geeks is on reality, and just how little chance of survivial they would have in such a scenario...
Jon Erikson, IT guru
*sigh*
The reason concerned Christians attempt to teach others the error of their ways is simple - without accepting Jesus into your life as your saviour you are destined to end up in Hell paying for your sins.
We try because we care.
Only those who do not truly love their fellow men could ignore the misguided beliefs of the athiest and the heathen - compassion forces one to act to save their eternal souls.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
I never have done so, but I was in the errrm.... hospital with a guy who stuck his dog in the microwave. Apparently the smell was so bad that his parents left all the windows open and stayed at a hotel for a week. When they got back, the smell was still so bad that they promptly vomited as soon as they walked in the door. Needless to say, the microwave was ruined.
Here's my list of inventions/subject areas that I think would be both possible to implement and most useful with very little base technology behind it (metal working is the only real requirement; you'd have to introduce that as well if it wasn't sufficient). Someone should write a "Future Knowledge for Dummies (1100 A.D. edition)"
Note that some of these might seem a little ambitious, but they are all based on very simple principles (once you know them, that is). For instance, making a transistor wouldn't be possible early on, but with an electric oven and some chemistry developed, you could probably produce crude doped semiconductors, then improve upon the process as you move along.
Germ theory of disease
Printing press
Gunpowder
Steel
Basic principles of chemistry/physics
Steam engine
Electricity (voltaic cells, generators, alternators, transformers, motors, light)
Refrigeration
Hydraulics
Glass (or would that already be known?)
Optics
Photography
Internal combustion engine
Automobile/motorcycle
Flight (wings and lighter-than-air)
Telegraph
Simple electronics (vacuum tubes, diode, transistor, LED)
Radio
Television
Computer
I think an ideal first language to implement on your 4000-transistor wire-wrapped 4K machine would be something like Forth; an almost trivial core, a very simple set of primitives, and the rest is effectively self-compiling and very space-conservative. You could hand-assemble your first Forth interpreter, then write an assembler in Forth. I know some people will say LISP would be a better choice, but I just don't like it as much as Forth.
I am become dyslexic, destroyer of words.
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
I'm talking about the whole history of the christian religion, from Constantine issuing edicts to persecute the Hellenists, all the way to the burning of Beatles albums. In other words, knowledge is still burned today in Christs name, even material as non threatening as pop music.
I just used the term 'fanatical monks' because I wanted to play on your use of the word 'fanatical'.
True, the monks you speak of did preserve knowledge, but from whom? I mean, it's one thing to recognize an oasis in a desert of ignorance, but one must ask: how did things get so dry in the first place?
If 8088 assembler was so great, how come nobody writes in it anymore?
If it came about, I think I'd load up on weapons, and become an anti-organisation vigelante.
So you'd become an armed sociopathic criminal. But a really self-righteous one, so it's all ok.
(Note: sarcasm.)
Take down all of the current senior managers who have Hitler complexes, before they can start controlling people and resources again.
So you'd try and break the influence of a small proportion of people who you see as the cause of all the world's ills by killing them.
Would you remind me just who has the Hitler complex here?
I think that would be a great opportunity to change the awful ways in which we choose to use computers nowadays. Change all aspects of computer connectivity, the GUI, the awful, overrated binary system, and expand on more crazy ideas, like an efficient implementation of neural networks into hardware to allow for evolving software to be written, drop the idea of software updates (which I think is the biggest flaw of computing as it is) by writing self-healing, smart code.
These ideas are NOT far-fetched. They are all within our reach, and are only prevented from becoming reality by the way the current computing scheme is instilled in our minds, our behaviour, our culture. It's a 60-year old idea which has become very stagnant. All we can improve now is speed. We do the same awful things, but faster.
I think that this rebooting the world should be done deliberately; we don't have to wait for a catastrophy to improve the way we expand our intellect.
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$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
By allowing geeks to flourish, we're denying the forces of nature which should by rights have eliminated them from this planet.
I say let's stop this madness! What we need is a geek cull. Kill the majority of geeks and then keep the remaining few as slaves. Yes!
At least we'd be safe from Kevin Warwick and his Cyborg Army.
Or maybe that's what he wants us to think, eh?
Anyone living on a self-sufficient farm with their own water supply would be in fat city. The Third World would become the First World and vice versa. All that Cannibal Welfare Mutant stuff from Y2K scenarios would start to come true. Mankind would endure, but a different class of people would thrive. Eventually, the hustlers, evangelists, political opportunists and barons would elbow their way back to the top of the heap.
Virus writing is easier than it has ever been and if people don't disable VBS on their systems soon, we could all be in for some rough times.
Seriously, how hard would it be to make a virus so bad that folks would erect a memorial in its honor decades later? Buffer overflow, anyone?
Virus technology seems to advance much faster than consumer-level security. Is that perception correct or just created by the evening news?
"hopefully the western world would see it as a chance to redirect its goals" ??? Excuse me? What goals are those? A better standard of living, perhaps? At least we've figured out that crops don't grow in sand and that we should'nt poop in the same gutter where we get our drinking water. I feel bad for all the people that have been downtrodden, but if it's that bad, try moving somewhere else. Mankind has always migrated to greener pastures. If you choose to live where there are no natural resources, why should we "redirect" our goals to support you. If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
...and so they have millions of babies in the hopes that one of them won't starve to death in the next draught? If you're only making $500 a year, how do you support a family of ten? Wouldn't you think that after a couple of thousand years of that, they would have figured it out. Or has malnutrition made them stupid, only capable of fostering another generation of starving infants? How about we send 'em food and they quit breeding like rabbits? Then maybe they can get their population down to a self-sustainable level. I'd give my last dollar to someone who would use it to better themselves and their situation. You're right, though, our tax cut could feed the world. Then when the money was gone, how many more would there be to feed? Would you then come crying to us again, wimpering for another handout while doing nothing to stem the growth? How much food will you need then? Where do you expect it to come from? A what point should my family go hungry? Last time that I looked, the earth was a closed ecosystem.
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
This book covers this scenario fairly well. The idea is that Alpha Centauri went supernova and radiation toasted everything electronic. Interesting read
I lost my copy of the green golf ball joke can anyone find it for me?
Without computers, you won't have electricity, water, gas, phone, and most factories will just shut down. In fact, we will be back to the 18th century, except we will have more knowledge (but most of our knowledge is stored in computers).
.sig
This will affect more than 95% of the world population, I think.
Take off every
Ni!
Y2K - the beginning of the end
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
You talking about Kit Lester? Yeah, I remember him.
I'm too sexy for you.
An earth destroying event eh??
I think I've heard plans about an intergalactic superhighway... but I tend not to pay attention to these affairs.
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
The reason we continue to manufacture computers in the same basic manner, is that the science at a basic level has been most thoroughly researched around where we are. Silicon isn't neccessarily the best base material, but it's been worked with longer than anthing else. If this happened tomorrow I bet we'd just be scrounging around for some old equipment to remanufacture everything basically along the same lines.
"And it would serve to clean up the current gene pool a bit." Trolls are too damn stuborn to die peacefully.
Not everyone follows the christian path and believes in the ten commandments. Besides, it says thou shall not kill, not thou shall not maim, harm, injure, defend thyself, or beat the shit outta someone who deserves it. And as others have said not all geeks are pizza eating quake mongers. Sure I like pizza, but I also like hiking, camping, target shooting, hell I read survival manuals and army field manuals in my spare time. Geekdom encompasses a lot more than just computers.
Where do you get child molester from non-christian? And who says I'm hiding behind the letter of the bible? I don't even believe in that hogwash (in my own opinion) anyhow. Oh that's right.. I forgot the christians classify anything that doesn't follow their vision as evil. No wonder they had the dark ages and the crusades. I could care less about ignorant philosophies about turning the other cheek. When those that wrong me redeem themselves in my eyes I'll forgive them, if they continue to wrong me why should I not get back somehow? I have yet to see a time when things balance out completely and fairly. I can't stand pacifists either. If I see someone harming another I'll at least stand up and help rather than turning the other cheek. Even if it means getting my hands a bit dirty in the process.
How about an airborne, genetically modified virus (err, the organic kind) that eats silicon or copper?
I have tackled this idea myself as of late. I support so many old (but not quite legacy) systems. There are two problems as I see it. First, the average user isn't any smarter. How many of you use more than 25% of all the features in Microsoft Word? Most people don't even know how to do a mail merge. Yet, Microsoft insists on putting more and more features into it. Honestly, I can do most of the things that I need to do in Microsoft Word 6.0 for Win95. Second, the industry itself isn't as innovative as it could be because it keeps retrofitting all the technology, which isn't bad, but creates a lot of overhead. Moreover, PC manufacturers don't worry about efficiency. For example, RAM today is cheap as ever, as is HD space in terms of MB per dollar. BUT, is it any more efficient? I say no. You just got this new blazin fast 1.7 GHz computer, and it boots slower than my old Pentium I running Windows 95. All the industry does is make a bigger operating system, then make a bigger processor, and follows that loop. We are no more efficient today than we were yesterday. We're just operating on a bigger scale. The time has come to make OSes that can work on older machines, and are more efficient. So, we should all probably switch to some UNIX. Hell, with Linux you can load the whole kernel on one disk. Just try doing that with Win9x.
While we are at it, perhaps we can convince Bill Gates that "640k isn't enough for anybody"
What's asked is how we could return the world to the current state of computerization:
1. Get lots and lots (and lots) of monkeys.
2. Get lots and lots (and lots) of typewriters.
3. Get lots and lots (and lots) of office space, preferably in Redmond.
4. Issue a decree requiring all consumers of monkey dung and associated by-products to send a tithe of their hard earned money to Redmond (c/o Monkey)
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
I bet there are lots of textbooks and just plain printed-out code in archives that we'd re-use, too, from the way the post was originally phrased.
But I think we should pretend, for the sake of discussion, that the question read something like "what if we suddenly found, for whatever unstated reason, that all recorded information about the computer industry for the past fifty years useless had become unavailable to us" -- that is, if we had to use what we know to develop better things from the bottom up. Also, we can assume that all the people who wrote technical papers still remember their shit, so we can still use all that hard CS information to better design the new systems we design to get us back on our feet. Deal?
Now, of course, it becomes a lot more interesting. How would you even spread the news? (Dust off the ole' Guttenburg presses, eh? hehe. [I bet no modern printing facility exists that does not use electronics.] I call dibs on the English majors for scribes. :] )
"Damnit Silverman, I *told* you to print hard copies of all your code!" ... Has ops gotten our internet connection back up??...huh?...Well SOMEBODY had better tell me our stock price within the next five minutes if they know what's good for them -- what kind of insane assylum are we running here anyway??
...Alright, that's it, I'm taking tomorrow off again.[sic]"
("Yeah-but, there's sixty four thousand lines of it in seven concurrent source trees. Also, there's no more compiler--remember, all the world's electronics have been lost")
Well place a purchase order for a new one. Use your head, Silverman: we have deadlines to meet!!
(mumbles):"Damn imbeciles".
[...]
(overheard from the next room) "**Whaddaya mean there's no TV???!!**
I would probably live like a beggar, but then I really don't mind that :-) I'd probably join a religious order (monastic or mendicant) and spend my life quite content (even if it didn't reach our 'standard of living')
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
The rate at which we develop new technology will depend on demand rather than technical ability, as it does now. If we loose all our tools, there will be a much greater initial demand for agricutural equipment. That said, I think the development of computers will take off quicker than it did in the 1940s because people will know just how important they'll be.
As a side note, some very simple but essential things turn out to be very difficult to manufacture from scratch. For example, it's very difficult to make a screw thread because the device which makes them (a lathe) requires a screw thread to operate.
We are going to have to take out this chunk of the galixy before this could happen.
Go Crazy?
Don't mind if I do!
> ...how far down can we be knocked before we lose
> the ability to climb back up? Our industrial
> civilisation was built on easily accessible
> deposits of coal, iron, oil etc. most of which
> no longer exist. If we lose a significant chunk
> of resource mining capacity, then we lose
> civilisation for ever.
I'm sorry, but your logic doesn't follow. Civilization does not directly equate to mechanization, although the Industrial Revolution did certainly allow for advances in other unrelated fields that couldn't happen in a simpler society. The fact is that civilization is defined by the knowledge base of its civilians, not in the technology of the era. To put it more simply, I understand the concepts of electricity, and if some disaster came along that eliminated electronics and other such things, I could still use that knowledge to my benefit by, for example, building a wind- or water-powered generator out of materials already at hand (which wouldn't require mining or refining skills to do). The average farmer from the 1700's could not perform the same feat, even given the same materials, because the knowledge base just wasn't there. Once the knowledge exists, the means of implementation just requires time. Civilization cannot therefore be "lost forever" unless the people who make up the civilization all die, and then what's the point of this discussion?
> Second point: with the loss of machine-readable
> data, a vast amount of information would be lost
> -not even preserved on paper. Forget your
> (rather unlikely) info-disaster scenario
> - even losing the world satellite fleet would
> probably knock civilisation back (although not
> irrecoverably).
Again, non sequitur. Your assumption is that if communication is removed, the ability to communicate will disappear. All your satellite destruction scenario will do is slow down communications until those in the know rebuild the infrastructure.
> That's the problem with survivalism - any
> disaster that big leaves us no hope of recovery,
> whether it's WWIII, meteor impact, plague or
> whatever. The surviving remnants of humanity
> would be forced to live in harmony with nature.
> Than which there is no worse fate. So the answer
> is: in a sufficiently bad disaster, no-one would
> be any good.
Actually, the problem with survivalism is that most survivalists are notoriously narrow of focus. They assume they know the form the apocalypse will take, and prepare for that event, only to find that if something else happens, they're not going to be very self-sufficient after all. The best example is the large number of Rocky Mountain survivalists in the 50's that thought they knew how to protect themselves from nuclear war, only to discover that their plans didn't compensate for things like nuclear winter or radioactive contamination of their land when the fallout came, or the possibility that the apocalypse would take the form of disease or climate change, because such knowledge simply didn't exist at the time.
> Sidepoint: what makes you think most doctors
> would be any good? Without their X-ray machines,
> their antibiotics, anaesthetics, lab tests...
> you'd be better off with a Chinese 'barefoot
> doctor'. Or an army medic.
Um, a doctor without all of the fancy equipment is a medic, goof. Again, it's the knowledge of the human body that counts here. A surgeon can (and until the later part of this century did) work without any gear fancier than a bone saw and a scalpel.
Virg
Besides, if someone did try to breed a form that would damage pure copper somehow, there are plenty of ways for humans to work around the problem. There are other alloys and elements that have similar electrical properties but are different chemically.
Bacteria are never 100% effective anyway because they always have problems with reaching their targets.
If you really want to stop "computers" you are probably out of luck. You might as well try to stop "the wheel." But if you really want to disable a substantial fraction of a nation's infrastructure, take out power plants and telephone company centers. These are the real nerve centers of many things we have come to take for granted.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
While the concept exposed is interesting, lets take it further and give it a practical application - Colonization of another planet. You can bring with you all of the information you want, but tools, machines equipment etc are big mass items and you'd be limited. Now how do you build a technological society? Take a look at the simplest electronic devices around your office. How many different materials are used? Someone would have to produce those materials to make those parts. How many different sized screws are there? Someone would have to machine those as well. Of course someone would have to build the machine to make the screws. In the colonization senario, the technological problem is compounded by a small population.
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
3^16=43046721
(2^32) / (3^16) = 99.774551841010143374218909728339
So only an order of two there. Damn close!
All of the circuit-board-etching-pocket-protector-wearing Radio Shack dweebs would be GODS.
The typical geek admin *I* know is armed to the teeth with "Object Linking and Embedding Tools" like the AR-15 and AK-47. In fact, I never met so many gun freaks since I started working in this field. (I should have started sooner!)
Aren't chips built using a photographic proces for the microcircuits? If so, isn't this image stored in hard copy format somewhere, perhaps a lot larger, so people can argue about the design at meetings?
If so, you could probably make some big ass chips in short order (using the image shrunk down and projected onto some material that would only let metal stick to areas that get light, or no light, whatever).
All you'd need is one computer to produce a whole hell of a lot more.
This reminds me of "without tools, how did they make the first tools?"
Well, if I got thrown back in time...
First I would find a place to stay, perhaps with a religious charity. I could do cleaning and other handiwork for them. I would save my money to buy stone knives and bearskins. From these, I would build a mnemonic memory circuit which I could connect to my tricorder and use to contact the computer of the starship Enterprise.
Once I have access to the ship's computer, I would try to find out who caused the destruction of all computers and this annoying time warp thingy. It's probably Edith Keeler. (Idealistic twit! I knew her ideas would get us in trouble someday!)
Anyway. Assuming I can kill Keeler, then I run home...through a wall.
Just my thoughts on these vital questions.
Eris
Of course we wouldn't start with all the fancy doped semiconductor stuff we use now, but we wouldn't have to regress to vacuum tubes either. It would not be difficult to set up silkscreening equipment to get basic circuitry. That will give you everything you need to get started, including logic advanced enough to run equipment (forced growth machines, doping equipment, etc.) to get you close to where we are today after only a few generations. We'd be back to playing Pong in 6 months, and people would be trolling Slashdot II in a year or two, tops.
MM
ps. I submitted this a minute ago, and it somehow lost my username and went in as anon. Weird.
Step 2: Write the compiler for your language in machine code.
Step 3: Use your simple language & compiler to write compilers for slightly higher level languages.
Step 4: Repeat Step 3 until you have a C compiler written in C.
Step 5: Write a compiler for any language you want using C.
Step 6: Write apps.
also by 2ndPersonShooter: Voices Inside My Head - The Unauthorized Autobiography
You got at least 2 (or maybe 3) people to mod this crap up. I have to hand it to you--you sure know how to reel them in. Of course, it's been so long since I saw a "Jon Erikson" post (and where's "Dan Hayes" these days) there's probably a lot of moderators who don't know you.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
If all the computers in the world are dead, maybe it's time for us to get a life, you know, spend some time with something else than machines, get a girlfriend, make friends, read good books, in one word : live.
We all know the people who invented COBOL and FORTRAN were geniusses.
We've just met a new alien society. They have approx. 50's technology. Earth, as a sign of good will, decides to teach them how to make a modern computer industry. How would we teach so as to avoid the pitfalls we've fallen in to?
Of course, that synario would generate debate as to whether it was ethical to plunge a society into an information age all at once...
So, how would we answer the question? Make fewer assumptions about the systems staying the same? (Hard disk logical cyl/head/sect numbers come to mind). Or make it easier to change these assumptions later?
Remembering, too, that these assumptions allow optimizations - and any early computers need all the optimization we can throw at them. It took every ounce of strength an early DOS system had to bring up a C:/> !!
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
...we wouldn't have COBOL in more than 50% of our business industry...
to pronounce my name, I would have to pull out your tongue...
Talk about your ecological consequences. *shudder*
With 533 comments now posted I doubt whether mine will make much difference, and my views will most probably have been stated somewhere else, nevertheless I find the concept interesting enough to write a reply to.
Whilst most posts appear to be based on how we would go about rebuilding computers, they seem to forget that as computers now have become a fundamental part of business, we would be able to possibly develop a whole new type of computer with these objectives in mind. Having had our first "trial run" , we know the capabilities of computers and technology in modern society. We also know where it runs into problems, and where it can be improved. The system now is in a messy mixture and it could be much more successful by a uniformity throughout in order to progress faster. Take on the "end part" of technology the problems now surrounding HTML, javascript, CSS, XML and all that. We had a post about two weeks ago about how they were trying to eliminate problems in this by encouraging people to use up to date codes specific only for newer browsers. Whilst I realise this point is on the very end part of technology- the programming behind web pages, as opposed to the hardware itself, I think the example could most probably be spread throughout the system.
Do we really need so many different ways to store data? Floppy disks are unreliable, CDs, DVDs, etc etc...
I realise I'm very much picking at small points. Basically I'm trying to say that things would not be "just as they were before". We would have the opportunity to take great steps forward as a result of the apparent catastrophe. It would not be a disaster. It would be a truly great opportunity for us to start again with the knowledge of how to progress.
And, I also think it would do us all some good! Computers and technology have taken over our lives, and perhaps it would be good to realise what life is like without them- both the good things and bad things of living with and without them. It's something we don't have the opportunity to truly assess, and something I think would be good for society as a whole, not only the heavy users of technology such as ourselves.
Without technology, our lives are pretty much turned upside down. But this might not be such a bad thing. It would give society as a whole a chance to reflect and see how they truly want their lives to be lead, how they want technology to dictate modern advances or otherwise. And just maybe I might go and do the maths degree I chose not to do because I went down this path instead...
Hey, I'm an education major! That's not grunt labor :) It's sad, though... I mean, I could probably make due until before the invention of the car (I have some pretty solid mechanic background) but before that, I could teach and maybe write... that's about all.
We're only talking about a regression of about 50-100 years. Believe it or not, people did manage to survive in 1950, or even 1900. And we'd be even better off than them, because while we wouldn't have all of the cool gadgets, we'd have people who knew how those gadgets worked. The hard part was figuring out all the science behind everything. With that done I think we'd recover rather quickly.
Plus, like someone said in a post farther up, 75% of the world wouldn't even notice.
A really good book/series of books along these lines is by Leo Frakowski. The first is Crosstime Engineer. I think the series is called The Adventures of Conrad Stargard. The series is about a guy, Conrad, who's a polish engineer from the 21st century who accidentally gets warped back to 1241 AD, 10 years before he knows Mongol hordes come and wipe out Poland. Really good read.
I think people are taking this question far too seriously.
What the question is really striving for is, if you had to design a computing system from the ground up, knowing what you know now, what changes would you make? What mistakes would you avoid?
It's given that you would need to build some elementary systems before you could start getting close to the goal systems, and that would take time. But what would you aim for?
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Back to the use of slide rules and other mechanical computing devices. Anybody ever balance their expenses with a Big Chief tablet, a ledger book and a mechanical adding machine? Or send messages across the globe via a Morse code key? Or a Kleinschmitt teletypewriter? It's amazing what we managed to do without silicon, for instance, build atomic bombs.
And then see who gets voted off the planet.
Except that when you have millions of people stuck in a country with no naturally arable land, with one majorly-poluted river nearby, and no proper sanitation, and no one to tell them any differently, there's not much you can do. People don't choose to live where there are no natural resources, but they usually can't just pick up and leave. Granted, you can move from Canada to the US to Britain to Germany without much of a problem. But when was the last time you tried migrating from the Congo to the US when your family earns >$500 / year? No, you can't blame people in "underdeveloped countries". Often things are way out of their control. The world does need a wakeup call. That $1.6 billion tax cut you Americans are looking forward to is bigger then the GDP of most of the world's countries. In fact, $1.6B would feed 100million people for over 40 years!
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
neo-
prefix
1. New; recent: Neolithic.
2.
a. New and different: neoimpressionism.
b. New and abnormal: neoplasm.
Ex: New World: Neotropical and Neo-Dark Ages
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Well, I somehow doubt you'd end up with the monstrosity of Windows OS's. They're the dinosaur of computing. My bet is that you'd end up with something very evolutionary, similar to a Mac. But that's for software. For hardware, I would have to think that multiple, less powerful, CPU's would make it into the Specs. Also, since we're starting from the age of tech-appliances, I'd think we'd have two distinctly different computers... ones that do a couple of specialized tasks, and ones that do everything. They would be built from the ground up to talk to each other efficiently.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
One problem I can see would be that we'd have almost a thousand years to build up legacy code before the dreaded Y3K bug hits--by 2090, people will have realized that, once again, they'd forgotten to use more than two digits for the year, but they only need to add in a third, right? Their code won't be around in a few hundred years, so there's no need to use four digits when three's plenty...and so the legacy grows...
-Llew "I've wrestled with reality for years, and, I'm proud to say, I won" Silverhand
Wrong... kinda.
First of all, the difficulty would be the lack of language. 1000 years ago, there was no "English" language as we would recognize it, as well as no French or German.
And I must admit, we would probably start to suck at building a hand held calculator 1000 years ago, nevermind a computer.
However, there are some inventions that we take for granted, that weren't around during part, if not all of the middle ages. Things like chimneys were "invented" somewhere around 1400's in Europe. That's a simple idea, and something I think a lot of people would realize. Anyone being magically transported from 2000 to 1000 would have the advantage of knowing what is possible. If that person was reasonably intelligent, he might be able to be able to innovate some of the "inventions" early. However, I think the best person to survive an hypothetical trip to the middle ages would be someone from the early 1800's or so. Back then, we were in the middle of an industrial revolution, but we didn't need to use the technology we have now. Something as simple as the cotton gin would be reproducable without much technology, as well as improved plows, ironworks, printing presses, etc.
The best age for us 21st century types would be 1950 - 1980 or so. Just think of the fun one could have investing in new technologies around that time. :)
The bacteria would not have to be air-born. Put in in the copper for one computer, and it will spread to others via power cables and modems. Granted, it would have to be extremely fast and versitile to have much affect, but it might work. Fibre-op would stop the modem aspect of it, but once it is into the power supply it can go almost anywhere. As for cut-off systems, such as bunkers, maybe find some sort of carriers?(such as the people who use them?) A time delay between spread and destruction wouldn't hurt either.
Drummer beat & piper blow,Harper strike & soldier go,Free the flame & sear the grasses,Till the dawning Red
--
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
--
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Ooops, wrong world.
hehe
"Piter, too, is dead."
finally! i knew all that diesel fuel and ammunition i'd hoarded for the y2k catrastophe would come in useful!
If everyone is following good Engineering standards, everything is documented. The only loss is data (images, articles, things of that sort that wouldn't necessarily be physically documented.).
:)
So the question comes down to...
Did everyone print out a copy of their code?
As for hardware, same story. The question there however is how fast can it be rebuilt? Assuming everything is accurately documented...
I think this would be a horrible event because the less scrupulous companies of the world could add more nefarious features without the knowledge of consumers.
Since BeOS is based upon UNIX principles, has a journalling filesystem with built-in database-like features and comes with a really cute and well-thought GUI, it is the most likely re-invention of computing that might happen if people had to start from scratch.
--
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
It would clean up the pool all right.. by killing of the vast majority of western style humanity. The environments in which we live (for the most part) don't have the ability to sustain much human life any longer. Even if you're a survivalist with the knowledge to survive if dropped in the woods with nothing but a knife and your boxers you can't do it if there isn't any game within 100 miles of you.
jello.
aka aron.
If no computers existed, then we'd have to reinvent the manufacturing process. Much of current knowledge relies on computers. If we still had large transistors it would make things a lot easier. As far a programming them, right now, many of us are old enough to know how to do it with toggle switches. In 50-75 years, it's likely that the whole toggle technology would need to be reinvented. As for what would I change, or would be likely to change. I suspect we'd be able to skip a lot of bad ideas.
But, where would these few small electrical circuits come from. And building power sources from scratch would be rather difficult without some sort of machinery (most of which now includes some type of computing power, even tractors and bulldozers have computers in the engines). And the time it would take you to rebuild if something like this happened would be more than a few days I'm sure. Anything past a month and there would be some serious problems in society, with breakdowns of all sorts. Lack of supplies in big cities would be the biggest I would think.
I'm just having a hard time thinking of this as 'no big deal' when computers, transistors, and electronics seem to invade every part of our lives, even a lot of the 'behind the scenes' stuff that we aren't always aware of is powered by computers and electronics. As for the 'we could rebuild' comments, I'm sure we could, but how long would it take, and how many people are going to be willing to help as they are starving to death?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe America isn't totally dependent on electronics, but I have a feeling there would be some major hurdles to overcome before the rebuilding process began.
------------
True enough, but is that such a bad thing?
I'm not one to say that we should kill people off, but it would be nice if a disaster like this came along to kind of put humanity back in to perspective. Sure, there would be huge years of suffering and pain and misery, followed by years of rebuilding, but the end result would be a reminder to those that come after that humanity is not as god-like as we seem to be committed to making ourselves believe.
It's not something I would look forward to living through, but I'm not sure it would overall be a bad thing.
------------
It probably wouldn't. But some of us are sick to death of people that do nothing all day long be dream up ways to whine, bitch, moan, and create new ways to profit from the suffering of others. It would be nice if we were forced to work together on something, and the only way I see that happening is if there is some huge, gigantic disaster that forces us to focus on survival. Of course, I'm guessing this isn't a popular opinion and I will be labelled heretic or worse for daring to question humanity's righteousnous, but I often think we need to be knocked around a bit more.
The really great thing about something like this is it would put the great USofA in the same position as all of those "poor" countries that we claim to be so superior to. I don't know, maybe I'm just in a pissy mood today, but doesn't anyone else get sick of the self-righteous, WE ARE THE GREATEST, pat-yourself-on-the-back mentallity present in the world right now? Maybe it's just me.
------------
If all computers were wiped out in a way that prevented you from using even old versions, I really doubt that you would be able to build new computers before the die-off would begin. More than likely, the panic at the loss of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, television stupidity, and radio morons would probably spark a huge loss of life as people riot in the streets clamouring for a chance to have their precious entertainment. The remaining people would riot when they realized that food would not be easily obtained, or obtained at all. I still say computers would be far from most people's minds for a long, long time after something like this.
I think your estimate of recreating computers in a year to be very, very inadequate. It would take much longer than that if we were starting from scratch. Much, much longer.
------------
That's an interesting idea. Probably wouldn't be a virus (doesn't a virus require a living host's cells for reproduction?), but a bacteria, or something like that. But that is an interesting thought.
I wonder, if it was a copper eater, how would they prevent it from going after water pipes as well? This whole thing is theoretical, but the aim was something that took out computers and only computers right?
------------
There used to be a great TV series on The Learning Channel called Connections that did just that. I think that the hosts name was James Burke.
At any rate, he'd start the show with a mosquito and then show how Malaria led to the development of the nuclear bomb or some such.
Well, not exactly. But he'd take two seemingly unrelated objects or events that are separated by a hundred years or more and show the chain of technological evolution that ties them both together. It was easily the best thing on TLC, and they did away with it.
all your potato farm are belong to us!
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Why yes, all my base are belong to you.
How did you guess?
I disagree. One of the highest priorities would be to quickly restore infrastructure(electricity, water, etc). The fastest way to do that would be to replace the dead computers with working ones. Even if it takes a year to build another computer, that is much faster than trying to rebuild a power plant so that it does not use computers. Granted, it all depends on how long it would take to build a new computer, but I wouldnt just give up on all the existing infrastructure so quickly.
You are trying to look only at the immediate state of the world without thinking about the future. Yes, food, water and heat will be the top priority and we would be unable to satisfy these needs using the dead equipment, but the only way to support a nation that was so reliant on computers is to find a way to build them again and quickly. Any plan you come up with to satisfy the immediate need for food and water and heat that does not use computers will not sustain a population of hundreds of millions of people. You can support a large population without massive infrastructure for a couple months or even a year, but pretty soon, people will start dropping like flies of malnutrition and exposure. The only way to prevent that is to have some sort of infrastructure that can handle the entire population and that will require computers.
I dont see how you can make that assumption. The government doesnt need infrastructure to sieze control. There are military bases just about everywhere (at least in the US) and local police forces literally everywhere. Within a day or two, the military would have control of practically every major metropolitan area. They dont need massive transports, just their feet. I wouldnt imagine that it would take more than a month for them to establish some kind of rudimentary local communication system (ie Pony Express in the worst case scenario). This would easily be enough for government to sieze control.
Yes, there would be massive unemployment, probably lots of suffering. But, this would not be some huge holocaust that would wipe out enough people to clean up the gene pool in any significant way. That said, I agree with the rest of your post. Personally, I would be more worried about surviving the disaster that causes this to happen than trying to survive after it did happened.
Been there...nuked that!
Yeah! When I was 8 I loved my CoCo 2. I learned BASIC on it. I don't know about a $300.00 5.25" floppy drive though. -ted
OK, fry all computer components, gotcha.
Consequences:
No electricity
No manufacturing
No refridgeration
Very Little transportation
Lots and lots of Chaos
Rebuilding computer technology is pretty close to the bottom of the list of what we need to do after such a catastrophie. These are the real questions:
1. What would we drink??
Water towers are filled by electrid pumps, electricity fails, no water, no water = no life (given enough time). So everyone either pumps water from their own wells, or drinks the river/lake water (yum!). and even if you pumped a community well somewhere, there is no good means of distribution for it. results include, swift spread of disease(indoor plumbing becomes worthless rather quickly) dehydration, death, and riots (water wars).
2.What do we eat??
I heard that there is enough food on grocery store shelves to last about a week without restocking. But most of it will spoil without refridgeration, and the source of nearly all food is very distant from most population centers. And without functional long haul transportation (all you got is low tech motorcycles, lawnmowers, etc) you will have food riots within days.
2. How do we keep warm??
if this happened during the winter, The pressure in natural gas pipes would drop quickly, (if people's furnaces still worked) and the supply of available firewood would fastly deplete in highly populated areas. OBTW, how many appartment building have fireplaces? And if there was firewood available it would have to be towed in behind old farm tractors, or carried by hand, a solution not nearly fast enough to keep up with demand. Result: profiteering, and riots.
Granted this situation only plays out well in the US but most of europe, and basically any large industrialized population center would experience the same thing. The US survives because of the efficiency of it's infrastructure, and dies without it.
The first thing that people would do is drag out any functional transportation equipment, old school busses, tractors, cars bikes etc. and work to rebuild some semplance of distribution for food, water, wood etc. Then get the water/sewer system working. IF we can focus on the development of new computers anytime in the first 5-10 years, I would be very surprised.
Homer, that's not God, it's just a waffle Bart stuck to the ceiling
I know I shouldn't eat thee
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
I would not mind reliving the good old days of PC gaming, although I might have to wait a few years to get back to that level. Think of what Carmack could do the second time around....
Knowledge is power
I think, in your scenario, we would recreate computer industry pretty quickly, maybe within a year, short-circuiting punch-cards and vacuum lamps, of course.
Wroot
If you dont think geeks have that "killer instinct", you've obviously never worked on a helpdesk!
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
This question ranks up there in such fields as what if an asteriod struck the Earth and other random Hollywood plots. All you need now is a drilling crew and you have yourself a movie.
I guess people just have a natural fascination with best case/worse case, when, in reality, things usually happen in between.
Of course it's an interesting thought experiment, but, lets face it, there isn't really anything which would be that selective in its destruction, which wouldn't involve something more important than the "reset" of all electronic systems. Yes, we are still alive after Y2K.
Something happens that big on a global scale and you're worried about legacy systems?
Well i think we would not recover within 30 years,especially developped countries would get hit big. Why?We don`t have enough IT personnel at the moment and the fact is (roughly estimated) 80% of these IT`ers we have now is not inventive.They go to school learn how to work the exsisting software,they aren`t die hard computerfreaks and if these were the DOS days they wouldn`t study IT,they are in it mostly for the high pay.The people that would have to build everything up are people like us(I assume you guys are like me and don`t need all these flashy,colorful things like windows to be exited about computers and would be just happy working all day with DOS or something else in black and white).
Some countries like India and China on the other hand would be happy if such a thing happens as they have alot of IT`ers,most of them very inventive(It`s just a fact,because IT salarys aren`t very high there and if you want a high pay you become a docter in India or you fled to South korea or Taiwan in China)
Geeks would rule the world,why? Now big business men rule the world,because people need money. If computers would fail people(addicted to computers) and big Business men(unable to run their big companies withput computers)_ would be so desperate to get computers back,that money wouldn`t be a problem.The geek community could ask how much money they wanted to recreate computers and society would thus be controlled by the geeks. You see all people wouldbe in deep s**t if computers would vanish,but geeks could do something about it,while others would have to wait and hope the geeks quikly fix things.
Another thing i too live in a third world country. My country(Surinam) wouldn`t be effected by such a thing,only a small group of people. Although the trade with foreign countries would be killed as the rich countries wouldn`t buy anything from us(because they wouldn`t have money),our self providing economy would provide our country.The people in the rainforest and in the isolated areas of my country wouldn`t even notice a thing.And we city people would quickly rebuild as we aren`t very dependant of computers.It would be very positive for my country,because we then get a fair chance at building our economy. Now we are being held back by isolationism of the rich countrys and all their restrictions against our goods,but if they would be in such a disaster then they wouldn`t have enough economic power to hold us back. That is why I and others like me love to create virusses,pirate software and attack servers of big companies,just to cause as much damage as possible to the western economy,because we really hate the west for all the bad things they have done and still do to us. It is why i am glad with california`s energy crisis,that quake in seattle and mad cow disease in europe.And you might not realize it but there is alot of poverty and other problems in latin america,africa and asia and it`s all your fault and one day it will catch up with you and you will get it hard. Like the saying says `what goes around comes around`.
The first computer is hard, the millionth is a lot easier.
Mining and refining the first pound of iron ore is hard, the millionth pound(with iron/steel tools) is a lot easier.
It seems like a lot of different types of technology come to become "recursively" dependent on themselves as they mature.
Also it should be noted that some works of the roman were saved by the arbic cultures of that time. I believe it was the medical developements and mathimatical. HUGE losses were incured when Alexandria burned down (some old big book store they say :)
ONEPOINT
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Die offs... that only part of it. I would think that there would be a lack of communication, only those who know morse code could make a living (no computer used), next farmers should be able to survive by stock piling there foods they should be able to trade and barter for fuel. Next would be the Handy man. Can fix just about anything and should be able to make a living. and lastly police. They have the guns don't they. Buy your protection.
... well they die off rather quick. Who needs a doctor when your worried about food in your belly, and if your shot they are going to blast another hole in you anyway.
Doctors / Lawyers
ONEPOINT
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First, people would get out of hand. No sense in argueing that, people would just go nut's without the ability to communicate ( standard phone lines would out so would cell phones ) Postage systems would be down also. ... sad outlook ... most likely if you have not had any mil/combat/survival training, your not going to make it. the world is to greedy and people will not share there goods with you.
Second, you would spend most of your time protecting your children and not your crop ( at least in the begining)
Third, due to all computers going off there is no fuel ( refineries are all computerized ). The chances that you have enough fuel to handle your crops should be slim to none ( also you would want to trade fuel for food. Also there would be dramitic weather changes.
Forth
There goes the stress free life.
ONEPOINT
rade your crops, and or take your personal property
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Forget that! He should be using http to post to slashdot with raw telnet!
To hell with purists. Visual Studio simply makes the job go faster. What's wrong with efficiency?
I agree totally with what you (and others) said. What this individual is asking us to do is to cut our own trees, shape our own wood, mix our own concrete, and fire our own bricks just to build a house.
---
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
Having said that, consider: this sort of thing would turn society upside down. It'd be a hundred years before we were even close to the level we're at now. We'd literally be returned to pre-electrical America, circa 1865. People in the cities would flock out to the country, there'd be more or less a civil war between rural and urban groups, and all hell would break loose. It would be a very stressful thing for everyone involved.
Except, that is, for me.
I'd pack up everything I've got in celebration of the destruction of the debt record, and build a cabin for my folks way up in the appalacian mountains. I'd grow potatoes and vegetables in a plot in the back, and use a still to make Vodka for trade. This, I'd bring by the gallon down to whatever town was closest, trading for guns, skins, and any creature comforts I could hook up. I'd spend my days fishing and hunting, and in general, not worrying about a thing.
Philman, Mountain Man! Yee, hah!
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Sort of fat, good looking in a disheveled sort of way.
While Lex & Yacc (& countless other lexer and parser generators) are nice, our compiler professor introduced recursive descent parsing as "Desert Island Parsing."
I guess that all I'm saying is that - Give me an instruction set, and I'll give you a compiler.
you probably couldn't scramble a CDROM, but you can mess up the hardware that read the CDROM. If the information is still good but you can't read it then what good is the information?
------
Hopefully someone would create a browser that was fully compliant with HTML4 without going going down the dark Netscape track first...
windows is not my only choice... i use anything else that is available.
Piers Anthony's Battle Circle
Until the End of the World
Mad Max
I feel like I'm forgetting one.
The interesting question this asks, is how quickly can an educated group without tools rebuild technology? To me, I think it would depend on easy access to the kinds of tools that built older civilizations. Wind would help; windmills can be made from wood, and trees are common enough. Running water would help, both for a water supply and as a source of power. Clay helps, helps a lot, to make bricks and therefore kilns, and from kilns come metals and porcelains. From the get go, assuming the land were clean enough and a diverse enough and well educated group were assembled, you could end up with a technology equal to that of Early America (the 1700s) in a few years.
Projecting the rate of growth beyond that is a little more difficult, because one technological innovation relies on others to bootstrap up the technological ladder. But perhaps 19th century technology at the end of a generation, with some 20th century elements (antibiotics, for sure), and with the recapitulation of a technology infrastructure, the rebuilding to near current levels by the second generation.
To get a feel for how this might be done, check out the Foxfire books, the ones that talk about old technologies, and how people lived their lives in the Appalachian mountains. Often they had to bootstrap their technology, and were pretty ingenious about doing it.
The elimination of electronics (and nothing but electronics) pushes us technologically back to about 1900 (assuming no other ill effects), as that's about the time radio is being developed into something useful. Now, if the whole gamut of other technologies are available at a 20th century (or 21st century) level, then recovery is fast. The materials scientists could rebuild the tools to make chips, the knowledge hasn't been lost, and we'd be up and running in a few years.
Of course, no "Survivor" and no "Temptation Island", 'till televisions are reinventedand do you happen to be a NRA member? Theoretically, if you are part of an organization that was called the "national Riffle Ascociation" it says something about you. I garentee the average NRA member contains a gun, and in situations innvolving chatic and anarchial circumstances, these people would be "walking around in the streets, waving their guns"..........
Losing all computers wouldn't mean no electricity. Although most chemical/power plants these days are computerised, as a chemical engineer I (along with many others) would easily be able to design and build basic power, refining and chemicals manufacturing plants without anything beyond a few small electric circuits. The power and chemical industries got along just fine for fifty years without any serious computing power around, so I'm sure we could cope again if we had to (as long as we can still integrate without using MatLab)
"It was a time of war. It was a time of rebellion. Cockroaches ruled the world. Man was extinct apart from one..."
You know where this is heading. A big special-effects filled climatic battle between good and evil where evil is quelled and eaten by the roaches.
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
Don't use no double negatives.
Don't never use no triple negatives.
Allow me to prove my sig logically:
There does not exist a problem, p, where p cannot be solved with a suiltable about of high explosives. Let us assume that the bigger the problem the bigger the amount of high explosives you'd use to solve it. Let's say that f(p) gives you the required amount of high explosive. We can state that f(p)=0 where p is a member of the set of real numbers and cannot be less than 0 and 0Using the above formula f(p)=0 given the range of p we can calculate that f(p) can never be 0 therefore there does not exist a problem (rated 0 for no problem to whatever for a huge problem) where using the value f(p) as the amount of high explosive to use where we cannot solve the problem and make f(p)=0 and solving the problem.
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
If all computers and technology get fried why should we go back to the same old system. I mean it must have been a crappy system to begin with if some disaster destroyed it in the first place, right? So I say we should try a new system. I call the I am god system. It works like this, everyone in the world should drop what they are doing, give me all their wealth and serve me! Now thats a better system then one any kernel hacker could ever think of. I dont know about you but I would sure love that system. I guess without Diablo life wouldnt be perfect but I sure wouldnt complain.
Snake Pliskin!! I thought you were dead.
Someone hates these cans.
good book, read it in high school, a long time ...
ago, in a state (mental and physical) far, far
away. But, perhaps only one way to look at the
world. Who is to say that the same tech would
lead to the same place
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
So, if geeks dont have a killer instinct,
... after all, we
...
... come on ... post
:)
why dont you post your home address here?
No one will hurt you
dont have 'killer instincts'. Come on,
were all just a bunch of radically unfit
over or under weight pushovers
(insert more male postureing and
taunting here)
Just your address
it. We are your friends
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Who would get blamed for a computer apocalypse?
Personally, I would get my motorcycle tweaked up,
syphon some gas, and go somewhere where no one
knew my previous profession.
He's a geek - No I am not - but he turned
me into a newt - Into a newt? - I got better
-Crackelf, butchering misquotes
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
The real question is not the time taken to recover or the method. Instead it should be (in light of another ./ article today on patent law), would we be able to afford the royalties to rebuild?
Given the sudden "gold rush" of patents on cyber law, which some amazingly way have been passed by the US PTO, could you imagine the bonanza that would be created by the aforesaid disaster?
Imagine a world where all electronic records are lost. Oops, there goes the PTO's database of prior art, and not to mention all of its patents granted in the last 10 years....
Imagine trying to rebuild that world where every business-savy individual is out patenting every variation possible on building computing because they thought of it first, and abstract thought is patentable isn't it. Imagine trying to rebuild a technology base where you are forced to pay fifteen different individuals, fifteen different royalties just to build a motherboard.
That, my friends, is the real horror behind the question. .... Technology legal madness cubed ....
I realise that, but the point is _when_ he said it.
.sig this!
Clean up the gene pool? I doubt it. It would probably promote the procreation of NRA members. (And what a would that'd be!)
.sig this!
Try out 'Day of the Triffids'by John Wyndham. Synopsis: everyone gets blind (mostly) and some genetically altered plants beat us up. The story is, however, told from the perspective of a sighted person. Wyndham digs on these 'cataclysmic events.' I have yet to read one of his books that doesn't have me depressed up until the end.
What one has to take into account is that our 'online communities' are evolving and that they will incorporate more of what we consider staples of human interaction. Humans are social creatures that crave sensory stimulation. If someone offered you the option of using a 'chat' application that allowed you textual input and output, or video/sound i/o, which would you choose? personal prejudices aside, most people would opt for the latter. You'll note that our existing medium has allowances that mimic human gestures to express moods - emoticons. We're working within the framework forced on us by bandwidth and resource limitations to express ourselves as we would in a face to face conversation. What people are undergoing in 'online communities' is a global awakening. Not in a literal sense, although that is an opportunity made available to us, but more along the lines of being able to pick and choose who we interact with out of the whole. Not your physical neighbors, but the fellow two towns over who shares your love of model trains, or the woman on the other side of the globe who also lost a child and is seeking solace in a group atmosphere. Don't doubt that these online communities will continue to evolve in a way which mirrors human interaction on the physical level. Having said this, there is no substitute for a human touch. Too often we fail to realize what we really crave is a validation of our existance through an outside agent: a girlfriend, a mother, a father. I can't stay away from the virtual pulpit...people need to work on being better to each other.
If some major event happened, such as a prolonged period of solar flares, a nut case exploding loads of nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere etc. (you basic large doses of EM) that ends up frying most if not all our electronics, where would we start trying to rebuild?
If only earth bound systems where affected, it would mean no air travel (no radar, no fly by wire), very few new cars working (fried internal computers), large ships e.g. super tankers running aground (again no radar/sonar/ computer control engines), non of the newer telephone networks working (most new telephone switches are just big boxes of electronics and not mechanical like the old ones), westernised hospitals (those that use electronics) loosing patients hand over fist as their monitors etc fail and after a few months large chunks of metal falling out of space as satellites that require orbit corrections from earth fall down (US DoD spy sats usually have plutonium power plants). In general we would probably experience a planet wide collapse of government and more than likely anarchy.
After which....
You can't access anything that has been stored on a computer ever! All your computers are dead for a start. All your hard disks are fried. Your tapes, floppies and CDs are useless because the devices used to read them are also fried. Would it be possible to rebuild to the current state of play, more to the question would you want to?
If we had to start again would the first new generation of computers be like Colossus and ENIAC (valves etc.) or would we skip straight back into silicon or some other new fangled material?
When we get back up again, how long before we have a 2/3GL to code in, and would you have to / want to (all you sadists) code your base OS in binary?
I ponder on.............
We wouldn't have to truly start from scratch. The designers would still be around, and they would know the basics of how to design a chip. Sure, the first few generations of computers will be lousy as they don't have the tools we do now, but that will simply mean the first post-apocalyptical computers will be only as powerful as an 8086, just without the bone-headed parts (the scant number of registers on the x86 is near criminal, IMHO). One of the side-affects, too, is that those revolutionary/evolutionary designs that break legacy systems may be implemented, causing better performance than before. The design and implementation will still be there, we just won't go down as many of the dead ends getting there.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
the same ole technology would be quickly reinvented From books, minds, etc.., so that someone can sell you something.
OK, howabout all books dead as well? The aliens are nazis and after they EMPed us, they burnt the books?, OR they have technology to move things to other dimensions, but like in the show Sliders, they dont know where stuf goes.
All humans suddenly get dumped on an earth where no sentient beings have ever been.
IMHO the second is better as like stated in an earlier post, we can cook up some red rocks and make iron. In a situation like this, all tech will have to start at the ground up, agriculture is on top of the list, then medicine, then industrial revolution. Most high-school graduates should be able to build tech up to a BC(before computer) stage, they should also have developed some infrastructure that could be used to make 'puters. That means that some of us can go on holiday while these guys are rebuilding society.
I hate to be the pessimist but has anybody seen escape from L.A. that actually happened, but it was all electronics. So maybe it might be for the good, we can start from where we are now all over again and use only good media formats, meaning no sony propriatary junk like a memory stick, and one standard instead of dvd-ram vs. rom, and smart media vs. copactflash vs. IBM microdrive. Max
It will help that we won't be constrained by x86. Though in modern processors it's really not that big of a deal (yay, hardware translation).
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Sure, microwaves could hose all the CD-ROMs laying around outside, but not the ones in...metal cabinets, not to mention all the CDs stored in those data archives in the mountains of Utah and the salt mines outside of St. Louis (in that big warehouse that has the huge US Post Office sorting center...it was on the Discovery Channel) or the salt mines up in the Rust Belt and the salt mines down in Texas and Lousiana.
But what would fry ALL the CD-ROMs and HDs and CD-ROM drives and MO drives and Orb and Jaz...Zip drives have the click of death...they'll die before anythnig nukes them...what will fry all of those media that won't kill all the people that'll want to access the media?
Actually, I'm a pretty decent shot with either a Mossberg 590, Glock Model 22, Uzi Eagle .40 or a BFG.
So maybe you should stop trolling here...go teach some IT classes at Bob Jones U and stop generalizing geeks as pizza eating Quake fiends that don't get out much.
The machine didn't necessarily have "bytes" at the time. It wasn't even necessarily electronic. Even if it was, it was likely to hold a decimal value as one of ten spots being "on," and adding by decrementing one argument until 0, while incrementing the other meanwhile--though more expensive machines had addition lookup tables in hardware *as an option*.
And multiplication? Not in hardware, but repeated adds. Division? *shudder*
hawk
Do we lose our heavy industry while we're at it? And *much* more importantly, what about pesticide production, seed, and water distribution.
Without a steady supply of freshly crossbred seed and pesticide, agricultural production will drop rapidly *each* year. The industrialized nations would have nothing left to export.
The nations currently facing starvation are the only ones whose situaton might improve: In all of those countries, there is more than enough food; the problem is goverment and/or rebel corruption that either stops the distribuiton or steals the food. Over half of the countries with segments facing starvation actually *export* food. Why might they improve? With the collapse of machinery, the armies will have trouble maintaining their hold.
And then somewhere in all of tehse messes we need to worry about rebuilding the machines. Given a catastrophe that puts us into such a predicament, computers will be the least of our worries . . .
hawk, economist
Why would the lesson stick around any longer this time?
hawk
Brewing. THat would save me :) Especially it it's at least 200 years, before yeast was understood . . .
hawk of many hats
>Things like chimneys were "invented" somewhere around 1400's in Europe.
were they? I can't imagine central heating without a chimney. The
*romans* had central heating. They even used them in Britain. Once they
left, it was 1500 years before it returned . . .
hawk
You'd probably be considered good looking (tall, healthy) to, which might help.
Why would this be the fastest? Because you don't have to rebuild N different chip plants for N types of chip. If everything's on one chip, then you only need the one plant.
It would also mean that you don't have N different methods of scaling, as two boxes on opposite ends of a network would not be differentiated from two processors in the same box. So, you'd throw out SMP, MPI, PVM, etc, and use a single protocol for everything.
However, this would mean that the networks would need to be upgraded. Instead of twisted-pair and other relics, you'd have to standardize on the fastest optic fibre you could use. Why? Same reason as for chips. Building one router and one type of cable is much more efficient than !N types of router, switch & hub to support interoperation between all possible network architectures.
Optic fibre would need to be the standard used, as that's the only way you'd get high enough speeds to make the parallelism work on any scale.
The CPU segment of the chips would also need to be programmable. It wouldn't require much extra effort or silicon, and you'd be able to make use of a much larger base of programmers, afterwards.
For much the same reason, Linux and/or one of the *BSD's would become the standard OS. Proprietary OS' would become extinct, as nobody would remember how to write them. Too few people know too little each for any proprietary system to recover.
But the last part is the killer. With something like this, you've essentially one global virtual super-computer, whose architecture is completely programmable and can be optimized for the tasks currently running on it.
The reason that this is the killer is that it totally obliterates most proprietary notions of systems. There's nothing to be gained by hoarding, on such a system, as the only way to do so would be to isolate. Since that means a =reduction= in resources, the losses would be too great for anyone to go that route.
(This is the inverse of the modern environment, where isolation is the default. In this type of situation, breaking out of isolation gains resources but also costs, so proprietary standards can still be "profitable", at least on the short term.)
When you're forced to reach out to others, living in isolation suddenly stops looking quite so attractive.
Last, but by no means least, this also forces something that many isolationists dread... The end of seperate nations. You can't rebuild 20th, never mind 21st, century technology on your own. No one nation has all the resources needed, and the risks of any other nation, federation or co-operative getting the upper hand would be too terrifying to allow.
The result? Well, if you can't allow other nations to develop the technology first, you'd either have to invade or form some kind of alliance. There'd really be no other choices. This would result in maybe two or three "super nations", within each of which there couldn't be any major political in-fighting. (Same reason for the loss of proprietary technology. The costs would far outweigh the benefits, if you =START= from a co-operative stand-point.)
However, these "super nations" wouldn't be stable for long. In order to trade between them, you'd need to be connected. And once you're connected, you've lost the only border that mattered. You'd end up with one world government, because that's the only stable configuration, once you've sacrificed rigid information borders.
Information borders are what define physical borders, and physical borders are what maintain the information borders. As soon as one goes, you lose the other.
Is this the "best" of all possible worlds? I don't know. Probably not. Boundaries are important for individuals to exist, and there's no reason to assume that that won't scale up. Is it inevitable, if we have to start from square 1? Maybe, maybe not. The loss of technology & science has happened before, when the society of the time outran its ability to handle change. And we're no more "global" now than we were 10,000 years ago.
Is it -likely-, though, if we ONLY lose computer technology? IMHO, yes. The only way to rebuild quickly is to rebuild uniformly and cheaply, distributing information as widely and as quickly as possible. And that means a "world computer", and that in turn means a "world government". I honestly can't see any other solution. The paranoia in today's world would force co-operation, because the fear of anything else would be too great for anyone to accept.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
To ensure value over a long period was actually the motivation behind both Donald E. Knuth's books on computer science (he put in only that stuff that seemed to him have reached seminal status, that would matter in a couple of decades or centuries, like a lot of mathematics does) and his 10year off holiday to create the TeX typesetting system:
Knuth was frustrated, that in a period where mathematical texts were typeset in a crude way, the typographical quality of his books degraded more and more. So he created one of the early digital typesetting systems, using one of the early laser printers (hm, I should reread that one from Knuth's excellent documentation "Digital Typography", that is a making-of-TeX :-)
So he got into the art of typsetting, created a program for putting font descriptions (meta fonts) into rendered bitmaps (Metafont), wrote those descriptions (Computer Modern font), wrote a program that could put boxed characters into lines, lines into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages (TeX).
Even more interesting he did his programming in a way, where he could generate source code and documentation from one common source, something he called literate programming (web/tangle) - a system that put javadoc to shame.
That documentation is actually a very good commented version of the source.
So the end result were two volumes with text books that explain the use of the TeX typesetting and the Metafont font generation software, two volumes that list the TeX and Metafont sources (with lot of comments), and the volume, that lists the font descriptions.
This means, that using these five volumes, that are thought to be kept around a longer time as real books, plus the knowledge of some higher mathematics and computer science (like a pascal definition and some books on programming) would suffice some halfways decent gifted individual in the far future to recreate a simple pascal like programming language, and then bootstrap the whole Knuth TeX system (down to the fonts) from the knowledge and listings in the five Knuth books. If you then have some *.tex sources around, you could compile them on your then existing computer and print them on your then existing printer.
I want to stress this, because most people think TeX is just some crude high quality math typesetter. No it is about being able to reproduce high quality maths in the far future.
For truly longish messages into the future (like pyramides or nuclear waste or climate change), I recommend a book by renowned hard scifi writer Gregory Benford about that matter.
The effect of computers has been to break up society in a profoundly negative way. People are spending more and more time on their own, on computers and on the internet. This has reduced social contact. This means there is now less conversation between people, and people are less friendly. Compared with forty years ago, there is less of a sense of neighborliness and of community.
On the contrary, I think I feel a greater sense of neighborliness and community online with people who share a few of my interests, than with those nitwits, rednecks, and assholes I keep having to encounter in real life.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
One of the main questions here is whether we could do a better job with the Windows, x86, JCL, etc. if we started over. It's possible that we could move everything to quantum RISC chips, but at the same time we would probably incur the same or worse "industry standards" as we have now.
For one thing, we can't assume that all the people who use BASIC will perish. At best we can hope that they'll end up on an ice floe somewhere, chipping GOTO's into whale bones. But the fact is, at some point, someone will say "hey, we can get BASIC to run on this", and the game will be up. (I don't mean to disparage BASIC too much; I wrote stuff in it too, but for the sake of argument let's assume that it's undesirable).
But more importantly, the process of putting together standards would be even more fragmented. Most of the gobbledygook in technology arises from copying functionality from older platforms. This is a process of social replication, that is, people copy things that they know and obtain from other people they know. This same process has been observed in other knowledge-based systems like the web and in patents and academic journals - people don't make *random* links between ideas, web pages, etc., they tend to copy them from other sources, and make small modifications.
This process depends on communication. By discussing or searching for other people's solutions to our problems, we can avoid duplication of effort. However, if we presumably have lost our computers and communications networks, we won't have the chance to unite to solve particular problems. Many competing standards will arise in areas that are isolated from each other. The ability for a competitive marketplace to weed out the crap will be heavily impaired. At best we will be left with small "communities" which are far more isolated than the current Linux or Mainframe or RISC communities. The process of uniting these groups will inevitably have the same problems we have now - incompatible solutions to similar problems, lack of interest in, or hostility to, common standards, and fights over patents and intellectual property, whether real or imagined.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I don't think you *can* scramble a CDROM can you? the data is physically burnt in the substrate. Anything magentic could be affected though. But I would have thought optical storage would survive anything but direct physical damage.
We must act now to place paper tape, punch card and hardcopy of all free software in a deep mine shaft. Then after civilization is rebuilt, the only software that will be left will be free software. We can not let there be a source code gap!! Mein Fuhrer, I can code!!
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Many 'geeks' have good general problem-solving skills that would be adaptable and applicable to this kind of scenario. Their inventiveness would make processes more efficient and would help raise the standard of living for everyone. They could design and oversee the implementation of systems that would speed the recovery of civilization. The survivability of engineers, architects, scientists, and computer experts should not be so readily discounted.
Also, to imply that the destruction of all computer equipment & media would reduce the world's population to hunter-gatherer groups is a huge exaggeration, imho. Although the event would be a staggering blow to society, it would hardly set us back ten thousand years. Many vehicles still exist that don't rely absolutely on computers. Other machines could be rigged with simple makeshift electrical circuits or otherwise modified to work without microprocessors. We still have paper documents known as books. So although our lives would be severely disrupted (and some lives lost), we would find ways to put things back together.
Sad all right. You learned assembly, were unable to take it further, and thus deride anything more abstract than your little circle of specialty. When you learn how to program in pure lambda calculus or S&K combinators, then I'll be impressed with your bare metal hacking abilities. All you come off as is merely antiquated instead.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
For instance, if I was thrown in the past, I feel that I could live comfortably if I could improve the life and health of a king and his court. Perhaps by building a plumbing or central heating system for his castle. But this always begs the question of where would I get pipes, pumps and ventilation ducts. I usually end up feeling dumber that I like, so I quit thinking about it.
You don't even need to be that clever (besides, blacksmiths can fashion pipes). Just convince them that bathing regularly prevents disease, that rats carry plague (time to teach germ theory), and that there's a big chunk o' land over west across the ocean that's bigger than all of europe that you might want to grab a good chunk of, pronto. Assuming you haven't been put on the stocks as a fool who bothered the king or burned at the stake for heresy, you might make a real difference.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Presumably the phone network would also die in this computer cataclism.
I'd rebuild that thing as a packet network, not a switched network. That would be a big improvement.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Personally, I would much rather contribute to the "great rebuilding" than find some line of work I can do without sitting behind a desk getting fat.
:-)
You'd rather work in the computer industry than do something where you'd sit behind a desk and get fat?
-
Such places are very unusual these days, especially in the developed world. Though it is probably true that those that grow up in a rural environment know a bit more about agriculture, what most of them know is today's agriculture, with technology and the rest of the world contributing to their efforts. Unless your community was some kind of idealogical effort, I doubt the extent of what you say. If you have time to spend on slashdot, _mess_ around with computers, or what have you, you in all likelyhood are well removed from the day to day toils that is involved with the production of food and other essentials at a subsistence level. I dare you to show me one low tech farming community that, without _any_ physical contributions from the outside world (such as machinary, pestisides, fertilizers, water, etc.), has truely prospered. In other words, name your community or any other. 80 years was a long time ago technologically and developmentally. Even if your grandparents understood what this meant, doesn't mean that you truely know that existence.
I think you're kidding yourself.
You might be able to survive, but being able to thrive by any means, means that you need a lot than mere intelligence and modest understanding. Even if your possess all those skills, greater society creates these things for you at such a level of efficiency that you simply take for granted how much effort they would take to create on your lonesome or with a small group of people. Such conveniences, are as a rule, created by large and developed societies, not by small groups of so-called geniuses. Even people 200 and 300 years before, who were far more acquainted with the land, could not just be set down somewhere and make a healthy existence. There are numerous examples of failings like this throughout history.
This is the topic of two recent scifi works.
Silverberg's "The Alien Years" is about an
alien conquest via an EMP pulse. Aliens control
the earth for a century, but they don't interact
much with humans.
The new TV show Dark Angel is post-EMP apocalyse.
The magnetic field never goes to zero.
The overall intensity may go to about a third of
current. Several "mini-poles" may appear
and move about relatively quickly, making
compasses basically useless.
This is known from (1) measurement of volcanic
eruptions that occurred and became magnetized
during reversal periods. I believe there are two
cases. (2) Supercomputer simulations of earth's
magnetic dynamo.
Field strength fluctuates between 0.3 and 1.0
Gauss over past ten millennia according to
volcano and pottery measurements. We are now about
0.45 Gauss, having dropped 8% since 1800.
Germany, Bosnia, Chechnya, all went rural during
the height of war.
I wonder how much of this stuff kinda-sorta works with existing hardware. For example I am aware that many CPU's have more than two permissions contexts in their MMU but since UNIX only has kernelspace/userspace and root/non-root as its security these extra MMU bits aren't used (correct me if I am wrong, please). I am not aware what kind of stuff you can do on, for example, an x86 box when using ring 1-4 but I bet you could do something useful. Then again, maybe not, the hardware support probably only exists for backwards compatability purposes and isn't actually useful because of some unknown (to me) caveat.
While a registry system seems good on paper, the MS Windows implementation should be seen as a skull on a pike for anyone else wishing to implement similar functionality.
Uh, I'm all out of rant. Move along. 8^)
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
...and Bill Gates wanted to make people pay him for it.
Yea, and that wasn't the way things generally worked in those days. His spleen venting rant about it has been legendary during since those homebrew computer days...
I wonder if he offered any of that money back to the actual creators?
Not a snowball's chance in hell. He actively tried to squash their company TrueBasic, actually, as they are clearly a competitor to his products.
Fortran was actually good for its time. COBOL, on the other hand was designed by a committee. Even if all the people on a committee aren't idiots, few good things come out of committee designs.
the original Fortran 68
Eh? What is Fortran 68? Are you getting it confused with Algol 68? There was a Fortran 66, but it wasn't the "original" Fortran, as its predecessor was Fortran IV (which was in turn preceeded by Fortran I, II and III one would assume). Fortran's original development was in the late 50's, not the late 60's.
No... BASIC was designed by two college professors as a dumbed down Fortran for teaching.
You can find these guys now at:
http://www.truebasic.com/
"John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz invented BASIC in 1964 for use at Dartmouth College. They made it freely available to everyone who wanted to learn how to program computers."
Well, if we follow the example of "Spacehounds of the IPC" we just need a few heroic individuals with access to machine shops. They'll smelt copper, draw wire, build an electrical generator, and start making bolts with which to fasten together the parts for a chipmaking foundry.
Well, you take your machine and build a simple input device for it - something that has a busfull of switches (8 in the case of a nice old CPU, or more otherwise) and one debouncer tied to a button. A little more hardware later, and you have a bit of hardware that can encode a word and put it, one word at a time, onto the bus. With this, you code drivers for an output device. I chose (once upon a time) an LCD panel which was easy to interface with.
Then, you use the same box and the output device and code up keyboard drivers so you don't need that damn box any more.
Then, get an EEPROM and save the results of your labour onto it so you can boot to this state later.
Then, you use the keyboard to code up drivers for a storage device, and you SAVE! YOUR! WORK! onto the storage medium and onto the EEPROM. Now, you can boot to the storage medium instead of just the EEPROM.
From there, you can work on an OS and a compiler and a better FS than the POS you probbaly had to hack together in the first place. Should take you a good while.. Then I guess you start on Tribes 3 (Let's face it, not everyone likes Quake). I never got to the storage medium part, I got bored after I got the EEPROM booting the system up.
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
Suppose YOU had a time machine and got stuck in some medieval time. Would you survive more than a day?
For those of you who don't know it already, Timeline by Michael Crichton is about that subject. It's worth a read, IMHO.
...and Bill Gates wanted to make people pay him for it.
I wonder if he offered any of that money back to the actual creators?
:-)*
Why not consider what it'd be like if we lost ALL our cultural infrastructure, and had to go back to stabbign cows with pointed sticks, and butchering them with chipped flints (now there's a lost skill).
Think about what it'd be like if we lost EVERYTHING.
No sawmills, no saws either for that matter or axes.
No mines, no smelting facilities.
No cars. No railroads.
No cloths. No cloth. No mills. No electic sheep shearers. No electricity either.
All the libraries and electronic records of our cultural know-how gone.
It's not going to happen, as neither is your scenario, but it's staggering how much of our lifestyle differs from that of cave men due to infrastructure rather than any advance in us ourselves.
The hard-working members of the MPAA and RIAA would be free from you filthy rotten pirates again! Britney could finally get herself off welfare!
OK, this thread really begs a response.
First, I find it difficult to believe that only 25% of the world population would feel its effects. Granted, not much of the world has seen a computer, but how close does the world live to sustainable, locally grown farming? This could just be buying US marketing hype, but I seem to recall that the US exports a significant amount of food to the rest of the world. Remember, without electronics, we don't have the advanced shipping planning that we have today, most of our ships won't work fully, and sailors would be relegated to using a sextant and a clock to determine their location on the sea! Also, without the infrastructure to transport feuls, farmers can only produce what their own manual labor will allow.
So, what whanau is basically saying is that 75% of the world population lives (or could easily switch to living) entirely on food grown locally by muscle power. Given how much the world is populated, I just can't bring myself to believe that. But, I'm no expert on that.
Second, as for the people telling whanau to move to better land: be very, very happy you were born in a land that doesn't oppress you! The idea that you can easily pick up everything and go to where opportunity is better is really one of the luxuries of the 'Western' world. Perhaps going to the better land would force you to cross active warfare. Perhaps there *is* no worthwhile land in your country, and all your neighbors don't feel like taking any immigrants. Perhaps you *could* go yourself, but that would mean leaving your family behind. Perhaps your family could all go, but you face the probability that one of you will starve during the journey.
I'm not saying that the people in these places haven't caused some of their own problems - such as political corruption and embezzlement, warfare and subjugation, etc. - but I am saying that the attitude of "why don't you just go somewhere else" is a luxury, and one I tend to associate with people who were born well off and never think about anything else. (If you want to put it into really simple terms, think of Simba in the Lion King asking for a whole gazelle - he just doesn't realize that he's that spoiled!)
Actually, I think that recovering the current state of the art might take a few years, but assuming it was something like a giant EMP pulse that didn't destroy manufacturing equipment, it would be quite easy.
You would need to build analog control equipment first - this could be made from vaccuum tubes, which are easy to produce. While primitive, you could get a decent CnC machine setup to produce the majority of the parts and tools you'd need. Chemistry isn't affected, and much of chip design has a LOT to do with chemistry and lithography, which is dependant on controlling light. Once you can produce extremely primitive microprocessors, the process becomes exponential. You wouldn't need to do a LOT of the stuff that came along the way in the current development cycle; The knoweledge and engineering is there.
The big ones - the understanding of the physics - is what matters. Back in tha day, we didn't know you could make laser diodes. We didn't know how to mass produce ultra-fine chips. The simulation tools would have to be rewritten, yes, but that would take one or two years, not 10 or 20. The microprocessor has only been around for 30 years! People forget about that.
In short, I'm not worried.. I know how to write a compiler :). Most of the old analog tech could be made from scratch in a few months - much of it was, during World War II. Microwave communications, radar, were all developed at rapid paces once the physics were understood - and we know all the physics now, nasty as it might be.
And, just in case you needed a reason to take EE/Comp Eng over Computer Science! :)
..don't panic
All products and services would have to cost even dollar amounts. Heaven forbid that someone would buy something that was 79 cents and wait for the person to calculate the change from a dollar by hand. It seems now that doing math by hand is a lost art. (At least in the US).
You may think you're some kind of 1337 killing machine because you can hit a 3D representation of another player over the net whilst maintaining low ping times, but you're not. Sorry.
Hahahahaha! Unlike you, I can separate reality from fiction. Jesus! I'm kidding! I'm making fun of you! I'm not really trying to counter your moronic, irrelevant argument! Ask a few of those English chaps to explain humor to you...
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Considering a large number of your "average geeks" are either gun nuts, trained in some martial art, or both, I'd say they could cope pretty well. Plus, all that training that Quake gives them!
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Anyone who finds this question intriguing should certainly read Walter M. Miller Jr.'s wonderful book about the aftermath of nuclear war.
For some reason, I don't buy it.
I mean look at all the big players out there. If technology just suddenly died away, what makes you think that all the geniuses out there will want to sit down and design a single chip, or work together to come up with a single solution for everything. There are too many ego's to stroke and conflicting ideas to expect everything to work together seamlessly.
Granted, it'd be nice in a utopian society to have all computer architecture answers now, and develop the ultimate computer architecture to get society back to where it is, but don't forget that people are greedy and will want you to buy their computer and their components.
Besides, do you really want one solution to solve everything? Just like Windows is your single solution to the OS. In other words, one solution (perfect or not) is a monopoly.
Junk yards are chock full of point-ignition gasoline engines, so transportation could start happening before too long. And as long as I'm exploiting loopholes, you said "microprocessor" and not IC, and from 1970 to about 1985, most "electronic ignitions", including fuel injection controllers, were based on circuit boards that featured very thick traces and no chips of any kind. A lot of those cars and trucks and busses are still going strong.
My biggest concern is that the cities may starve to death within a few weeks if it takes that long to get food coming back in.
Water, gas and electric I'm not so worried about--even though power plants are computer controlled, the computers are just there to coordinate the throwing of great big switches and those can be thrown by people. The lights would be on and the water would be flowing and the refrigerator just might keep running too. The furnace, though, is another story.
After the humanitarian disaster of riot and starvation, whoever's left has another huge hurdle to overcome: the world's communications infrastructure is now complete trash and untrashing it will take an amazingly long time, but ghod willing, "they" would settle on some standards this time around.
Speaking of humanitarian disasters, I don't know how well the third world will survive all this. If the nations in question aren't very dependent on outside food, they will probably manage better than the modern world, because their infrastructure, including communications, are still based on non-microprocessor technology. So they'll still have phones, and radio, and drivable vehicles. Most of the medicines they need are ones that are pretty easy to make, like polio vaccine and antibiotics.
As for us programmers, the vast majority of us will have to get real jobs, because ubiquitous computing will be another twenty years away.
P.S. I hope you have cash and a gun, because your bank account's fucked. Then again, your credit card balance is back to zero as well. It will be interesting to see who the new rich and powerful are now that all the virtual-representation money has disappeared.
--
This is not my sandwich.
No, he's saying that it would be impossible to design/manufacture a modern computer without the help of existing computers.
Which is completely beside the point. The question didn't have anything to do with modern computers. It was a question about how we would design differently if we could go back to the beginning with the knowledge we have now. IPv6 implemented from the ground up, firewire on everything, etc... etc... What if we could redesign the whole system with the knowledge to avoid the current pitfalls? What would we end up with....?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
But that's just my point. In order to create blueprints, manufacturing facilities, infrastructure and the chips/computers themselves, the scientists NEED computers.
Hrmmm... So what you're saying is that computers can't exist because there is no way someone could have built/designed a computer without having a computer? I'm pretty sure there's a flaw in that position somewhere... if I could just put my finger on it....>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Most of us reading this could lead a very comfortable life. We all have extensive knowledge that could make us useful advisors to somebody's court. I'm not talking about foreknowledge of events. How about a good knowledge of geography? Or enough math to be able to do polyalphabetic encryption in a world without good secure communications. Just having the concept of certain kinds of bows before they were developed could provide an edge in warfare.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
You should read this book by Walter M. Miller Jr.
It's a post-apocalyptic tale (aren't they all?) but there is a definite theme of responsibility regarding technology.
I.e. If it was technology that brought about the first disaster of humanity - should we really be trying to rediscover that same technology? Have we learned anything, could we be more responsible now, or is mankind just inherently stupid/evil/selfish?
I was hoping to write a sci-fi short story, many years ago. The thrust is on this topic, as well as on the "Anticryptography" theories employed in the SETI project.
In this, a SETI-like project was trying to make the Encyclopedia Terra. The media had a casing made of a hardy metal, engraved on the inside with the introductory materials that would explain how our language worked and how to read the denser media protected within. The media, graduated into denser and denser volumes, then described our technologies from simple to complex, as well as other scientific data about Earth.
Shortly afterwards, a nuclear holocaust wiped out pretty much all Science on the planet. A working sample of the Encyclopedia wasn't launched in a space probe; it was instead found by some of the progenic humans on Earth.
Encyclopedia Terra would bootstrap Earth. How would our world religions be shaped if "how-to" were the focus, instead of our current religions' penchant for espousing "thou-shalt-not"? Our Restrictive God's society torn down by Science; the next society's Instructive God torn down ultimately by Faith?
[
640Gb should be enough for everyone.
--Bill Gates, post de-computerization apocalypse
Basically, someone with solid basic knowledge of mechanical (NOT digital) concepts would probably be much more important in "rebooting" society.
Someone with an abacus, some ropes and pulleys, and the skills to use them could go far in such an environment.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Imagine if the company or government decided to spend enough money on a fresh development program where they buy and island, drop scientists off there, and deliver an unlimited supply of raw materials. The scientists would also be provided with whatever manufacturing capability they could design. They would still have access to theoretical knowledge, but no blueprints.
What might result from that?
t
"In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City. That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives."
:-)
--Snow Crash
Completely uncalled for, I know...but I thought it was topical.
--Just Another Pimp A$$ Perl Hacker who'll be First against the wall when the revolution comes
El riesgo vive siempre!
First thing I would propose is that all 3.5" floppy drives be abolished! All storage systems would then have to be designed so that they would be compatible with future speed optimizations..
Damn, I have waiting for the floppy on my PC take a minute to get 1 MB of data on a 1Ghz system with 7200RPM drives...talk about bottleneck!!
Have you ever seen the original transistor?
It was handmade, and simple.
And, as previously posted... the actual fab machines to make computers by hand exist - for 2 micron logic devices.
It doesn't take much computer power to code what's necessary to get the 'modern' fab machines going.
It's one thing to do it by yourself...
But the people exist, and have the know-how to build everything from scratch. Rapidly. As a singular effort, it is hard.
But as a massive group of people? Easy.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Personally, I can hardly wait.
There would be panic at first. If we had a worldwide and permanent loss of electricity, people would go wild snapping up generators to keep "their" power going. Then they'd gradually realise that there wasn't any more refined diesel fuel being produced. More panic. Probably 25% of the world's population would die. (probably the most useless 15% would be in that count, thank god!)
Then we'd get along. Differently. We'd start rebuilding things, and in two centuries we'd be back to where we were, with the blackout of 2001 no more relevant than the industrial revolution is to us.
If it came about, I think I'd load up on weapons, and become an anti-organisation vigelante. Take down all of the current senior managers who have Hitler complexes, before they can start controlling people and resources again.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OK, I'll agree that that wasn't very clear.
The industrial revolution was incredibly important to how we live our lives today. It was possibly the biggest single event (as much as it was a 'single event') to shape the world we live in.
BUT, how much time do we spend thinking about it? Or the black plague? Can you imagine what it would have been like during the plague, when a third of the population of Europe died? Incredible, and impossible to comprehend, but now it's just a note in the history books.
Anyways, my original point was that the complete collapse of society worldwide and all the horrors associated with it, would lead to the formation of a new society which studied us as a detached part of ancient history.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Just don't forget to wipe the disk clean before you start.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Most of the natural resources that our society relies on, we've either already exhausted to the point where you can't get them without heavy tech help, or you need tech to build them. Five hundred years ago, you could pick up red rocks, smelt them, and oh look, Iron. Not now a days.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Assuming that the hypothetical event that causes all electonic devices to vanish doens't also cause the world's monetary systems to fail, there will be no shortage of invertors and entreprenuers who will rapidly apply all the existing knowledge and know-how to recreate computers and electronic products. In all likelyhood, everything would be re-built in a very similar manner, as there would be tremendous pressure to get products back onto the market as quickly as possible.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
After people began reocvering from shock, there owuld be a few people who would relize that there is a lot of power to be gained by rebuilding the computer industry, and there would be no government to regulate it(or the government would be too busy to).
so you would have several people gathering the knowledge thats needed, each with there own view of "the right way"
in about 3 years there would be some machines starting to be built, all of which would be used to build better manufacturing plants. about 3 years after that, moores law would kick in. But tere would still be different standards, all competing to be 'the way'.
whichever group relizes that using there technology to produce entertainment, would probably be a good bet to become the standard.
FYI, if an exploding star releases its "magnetic energy" in our direction, this scenereo would happen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes but the personel wouldn't exist to do this on the scale neccessary for the whole US.
so your depending on all the racist groups, religous fanatic groups, cults, corps, anrgry people, paranoid people, gangs, etc, to stand together? good luck.
It didn't seem that way in any riot I've been in.
People with guns each of whom believe there way is the right way is going to have a negative fallout.
after about a year things will calm down, but that first year will be tough.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
DO you know what Neo means?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oh, and by the way, I did my time writing 6502 assembler and using punch cards.
You are absolutely right that many software developers would not do the work if they had to use only assembly language. So what? Many farmers would not farm if they had to walk behind a single-blade plow pulled by a mule.High-level languages and tools are not "watered down." The good ones allow us to develop software that would not otherwise exist.
So, have fun hacking away in assembler. I agree it can be a hoot. But get down off that high horse when it comes to programming languages. Either that, or quit using that browser to post to Slashdot...I'll bet money it is not written in assembler.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Those databases used two bytes to store a value from 0 to 99, or one hundred values. But, two bytes are capable of holding 2^16, or 65,536. In other words, there is no techical reason that the dates needed to end 2000, rather then 67536AD, other then short-signtedness.
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"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I think you have to get clear in your own mind just what question you are really asking us?
Are you asking what we would do if we had a clean design slate, or are you asking us what we would do if we suffered a technological disaster?
I get the feeling you are not clear on this point in your own mind.
These are two VERY different questions, with two VERY different answers.
KFG
I unfortunately live with a Tyler Durden type character who seems to think this scenario is possible, that we will somehow lose all of our technology in some massive crash. At least he is prepared by having lots of guns, stored food, a generator, etc. etc. Personally, I think he is partly insane.
Think about what it would take to truly blow away all the machines. 90% of humanity would be blown away with it. If the remaining 10% were lucky they might be able to scavenge a computer and batteries/generator/fuel to run it, but they won't be building new ones any time soon. With 10% of the population remaining, and out of that maybe .1% that has a technical background, people will be back hunting, gathering, growing, and building log cabins.
I say, lets get a clue now before we blow ourselves away. Because if we somehow did something massive enough to cause the loss of our technology, rebuilding the computers will be way down on our list of concerns.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Ever play a video game full of puzzles... like Resident Evil? Play for about 2 hours getting through all those tough puzzles, then forget to save, and the game crashes? :-P
You spend a good 30 minutes cursing, and hitting your head against the wall, then you start back up. You get back to the spot you were and save the game. How long did it take you? 30 minutes. Why? Because you knew every single solution to every problem along the way.
If our systems were destroyed, we wouldn't have to go through that period with vaccuum tubes, we'd go straight to transistors (thank god). We'd not have to figure out how to go from a 286 chip to a 386. All this info is in books, and we'd have the knowledge of every hookup and the solutions to those hookups throughout the revolution of the information age.
I think we'd be back up and running in no time. It wouldn't be overnight, but it wouldn't be more than 5 years. This isn't bad considering its been like 50 to get to where we are today.
Now keep in mind that I'm assuming that banks and stuff like that would go on uninterupted, which is a biiiiig assumption, but it wasn't mentioned in the question, so I'm assuming
--
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
But to answer the question, we would need to rebuild our manufacturing process, which is highly computerized, redesign the transistors, and relearn or make a new machine language. I can see this taking 75+ years with rebuilding the infrastructure of the manufacturing process taking 30+ years computer development taking 40+ years, and the latter 15 years for consumer level sales.
To rebuild the IT industry would also take an enourmous amount of funding, which relies on other industries to fund. The economy would die. Prices would skyrocket. Everything from the $0.79 taco to the $20 shirt at the mall and the $10k auto to the $150k house.
This would obviously cause a depression that would make the Great Depression of the 1930s seem like high times and the 1990s as the pinnacle of human history (which I would actually argue against the Romans, the Greeks, and the Renaissance).
Anyways...that's just my POV and I would probably rejoice. I could spend more time sociallizing, reading books, and learning some trade skills like farming and woodworking.
Amigori
-------------
Here's hope for a major technology reform...
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
2) Aside from Survival, The first step is to transcribe what we know to none perishable media. Suddenly ship skins, copper plates, and the like become very interesting. We all become monks.
3) Basic industries such as engines, etc go back to their earlier mechanical basis. Things based on embedded computing break down.(??) Note that the MIR space fungus has very based effects on plastics. If this variety should become both muscular and viable on earth it could be a big headache, since it does BAD things to plastic.
4) Major Political upheavals as the consequences of Global warming kick in with moderate sea level rise (say 12 - 15 feet, or 4 meters), combined with population explosions, failure of computer control containment systems for biothreats, etc. These and the collapse of the food distribution system means that populations drops (due to side effects) to at least half of what it was. Carnage all over the place - Being a computer geek monk in the hills suddenly becomes very appealing.
5) Watch out for the asteroids, while we are at it. Pick up Ham Radio, if possible.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm only half kidding.
If you ever watch a proficient abacus user, it's totally mesmerizing. For some people it's faster than using a calculator because of the ergonomics of the device. With practice, you can click the little discs around much faster than you can press buttons.
Of course, fancy things like sines, cosines, exponents and logarithms are rather hard with an abacus... But you have to start somewhere.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Sorry, Jon, but you try because you've bought into a particularly well-designed meme: that *you* will be saved only if *you* try to save others.
No, you're totally missing the point. I will be saved. I know this, because I accept the love of Jesus Christ into my life as saviour. Nothing more is needed. I do not have to do anything about anyone else to qualify for Heaven.
But it is my moral duty to try and help the misguided and ignorant to achieve salvation as well. As a decent Christian I cannot stand back and let these people descend into Hell without trying to save them.
It's people like you however, that make our job so difficult, and Satan's so easy.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
See Chairman Mao as an example of the 'elite' 'functioning' outside their training.
I very much doubt that the average geek has anywhere near the necessary force of personality and interpersonal skills required to mobilise a group of people, let alone the amount that Mao did.
And the thing about survival is that it takes a whole load of people functioning together as a team, not people who are more used to doing things there own way and bitching about people who organise things.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Along with team-building exericses, plenty of physical training and real-life combat simulations as well. Not just Quake and pizza I'm afraid.
You may think you're some kind of 1337 killing machine because you can hit a 3D representation of another player over the net whilst maintaining low ping times, but you're not. Sorry.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Jeez.. you come off sounding like a real clueless fuckwit, you know that?
Many people who YOU might consider geeks are IT professionals who work in teams DAILY to do their job. Teamwork is a very important skill and many people know that. Just because there may be those that don't know how to work as a team but they are most certainly the MINORITY
Just things I've noticed when working in various projects. The project managers tend to be reviled for ensuring that the coders actually do their job as part of a team, rather than just sitting down and hacking out some "oh, it'll do the job" code.
And this certainly wasn't the minority attitude. Just look at all of the acronyms used here for the people in charge, like PHB. They're all derogatory.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Not everyone follows the christian path and believes in the ten commandments.
Not everyone believes that it's wrong to molest children. So what?
Besides, it says thou shall not kill, not thou shall not maim, harm, injure, defend thyself, or beat the shit outta someone who deserves it.
Love thy neighbour? Turn the other cheek? I take it you've heard of these things? And besides, just because it doesn't explicitly say these things doesn't mean that they are permitted. To hide behind the exact letter of the Bible is no excuse for evil-doing.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Despite their love for violent computer games and anime, I vey much doubt that a group full of geeks, no matter what their skills, would be able to compete with some of the violent people that would exist in such a world.
There would be those that would create nothing and instead live by stealing from others, using violence as their weapon. Would your average geek, more interested in building for the future, be able to deal with this sort of person?
I doubt it.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
First of all, what you just described is most definately not developing software. Most of today's self-proclaimed "programmers" would be totally lost without MS Visual Studio holding their hands. Writing a cross compiler using existing code requires only the most rudimentary understanding of the methodology and processes required to programme a computer.
This disturbing trend has been compounded by the existance of so-called "object-oriented" and "visual" programming applications. Simply cutting and pasting snippets of someone elses code or attaching pre-written libraries to one's code is more akin to a "connect the dots" game or weaving pieces of pre-fabricated cloth together to form a quilt. There are very few of us who remember writing 8088 assembler code or writing programs on hundreds of punch cards.
Most of today's programmers would be completely lost without their watered down "programming" languages.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
That depends. Is it illegal under the DMCA to reverse engineer the device?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
(No, they wouldn't run out of fuel, provided they get out of the atmosphere with suffient speed and correct direction, nothing will be slowing them down in the vacuum)
"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"
You never know. We could have a couple Tyler Durdens running around, each of which has decided that we need to STOP, RESET, and try again.
But that's just my point. In order to create blueprints, manufacturing facilities, infrastructure and the chips/computers themselves, the scientists NEED computers.
Let me illustrate with a simple example. Chips today are on silicon--a forced-growth crystal that requires ultraclean and very gentle handling. This requires a big vat (or whatever) plus some automated control. Whoops, there's that word "automated"--can't do automation without computers.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
It's Jon Erikson again! Good try with your "people come first" junk, but since the hypothetical question specifically stated that only computer stuff was destroyed, I doubt you get many takers.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Gotta go back to the old "trollboard" and start again, eh, "Ana"? Too bad. I think you'll find you have an easier time of it if you don't post such long, rambling and off-topic posts. Something short and pithy is the way to get the knee-jerk crowd--they won't read anything longer anyway.
BTW, you also were apparently unprepared for this topic--took you at leats 15 minutes to get something up. Not a good way to get eyeballs.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
The world would have its computers and Internet back up in a few years, and perhaps it might be better, but somehow I think the real tragedy is the lost information. Billions of gigabytes of lost information. It would be sad.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
At a party not too long ago, a bunch of geeks (myself included) were dicussing the best way to try to ensure that important knowledge of our civilization survives us, particularly in the case that humans may be wiped out, but the rest of the planet exists for alien exobiologists to study.
Through the course of discussion, the best approach we could think of was to encode important knowledge (in a redundant fashion, a la Hamming coding, etc) into the "junk" DNA of several species likely to survive and slow to mutate.
I believe redwoods, cockroaches, and sharks were all suggested as candidates.
So the real trick is to work out a good system for genetically engineering species to carry our important information for us.
This could perhaps be applied to the problem of loss of computers, except that we currently require computers to read DNA! So the other thing we need is a way to sequence DNA without computers.
"Perfect numbers like perfect men are rare." -Descartes
This presents an interesting 'What if?' dilemma. Of course it wouldn't take *as* long to do this, simply because the expertise is there - there is a bulk of people who know how to produce microchips, and they would remember how to do it.
But the second point is more interesting. Catastrophic loss? I don't think that's accurate. The effect of computers has been to break up society in a profoundly negative way. People are spending more and more time on their own, on computers and on the internet. This has reduced social contact. This means there is now less conversation between people, and people are less friendly. Compared with forty years ago, there is less of a sense of neighborliness and of community.
Although people now talk of 'online community', the fact is that there is no substitute for real human contact. It is a vital, life-affirming thing, and has been recognized as such since the ancient Greeks, who talked of man's worth being measured in his ability as a social animal. The effect of computers has been to reduce it, and this has a real effect on humanity. Although we might be richer, more 'successful' now than before, people are not as happy as they were. This lack of contentment has led to greater human suffering - more suicides, more depression, and more unfriendliness. The cause of this, the distintegration of society and community, although not wholly through computers, is through people spending more time with computers instead of people - although ostensibly satisified with a computer as a substitute for a human being, they certainly cannot be said to be happy.
And in other ways too - not simply people socializing with computers instead of people, our enslavement to technology has other symptoms. People now are never free from the computer - their palm pilots, their work computers, their home computers and their laptops.
This has affected people's home lives negatively - the typical Silicon Family has Mom and Dad out till 9pm working, with the children taken care of by a nanny. This kind of family, if you even pause to examine it for a second, is a profoundly negative thing - all the humanity is removed from it; what, after all, is the point of living if you are simply enslaved to computers without any time for people, as these people surely are.
Although, then, computers have helped in terms of 'progress', the world my Mom and Dad grew up in in the 50s is certainly a better one than the one we have today, so I'm really not sure this would be all that catastrophic.
--
Hi!
Generally yes, we'd have to rebuild step by step. However, we should be able to avoid some of the more stupid mistakes.
Assuming that the knowledge is still available in form of man-readable textbooks, we could go straight to re-implementing things that worked out before, and bypass the known problems like
- using short-lived designs like 2-digit years in computers or hard disk interfaces that can handle only 32MB drive size(first DOS versions)
- have dozens of crappy programming languages- a handful new ones should do to cover most applications. My personal favourite would be a C++ with clearer syntax...
I could find more examples, but I think you get my drift.
C - the footgun of programming languages
would be to bring back the Tandy.
Say some cataclysm occurs that fries all microprocessors and scrambles the contents of all existing ROMs, disks, CD-ROMs, and any other machine-readable media in all computers.
The first thing I'd do is design a better surge supressor!
-----
Kvetch is Yiddish for "throw an exception" --Dr. Ron Cytron
>- using short-lived designs like 2-digit years in computers
But, contrary to all the hype, that was *not* an error.
While the cleanup cost was huge, an estimate was done as to what the costs would have been to use 4 year dates from the beginning. The present value dwarfed the costs of fleanup; it was by a factor of 3 or 4.
Early on, an encoded date wasn't a serious option; you had to store the
date you wanted as you wanted it--converting a binary digit to two decimal digits still had noticable costs. Consider also the additional storage requirements. Punch cards had, give or take, 72 usable columns. 4 digit dates cost two of those. Also 2 more punches by the operator per card--a 3-5% increase in labor. Then there's storying the date in memory. A buck/byte/month for main memory was a breakthrough when it happened.
Like other things that look like errors, this one just plain wasn't.
hawk
Actually, you don't need computers to make the blueprints for a microprocessor. Sure, you wouldn't want to design a PIII by hand. But, how do you think they designed early microprocessors? It was done by literally drawing the design on big ass sheets of clear plastic. Different colors for each layer. Drawn by hand in marker. These sheets then got photographically reduced to make the masks for the actual manufacturing process.
It's actually the same process today, just with better tools. The layers still get (at least partially) drawn by hand in a CAD program. Sure, the CAD program has nice things like cut and past to make the job easier, but it's still the same basic process. Quality simulators make it easier to verify that your design will probably work as intended when you manufacture it, but they are not any more necessary than a spelling checker in your word processor. At least not for simpler designs. It's probably true that something like a PIII with it's RISC/CISC hybrid structure would be almost impossible by hand. But, I bet you could design a reasonable RISC 32-bit processor by hand without automated tools. You might want to ditch the floating point portion. There is probably a reason that hardware floating point came along fairly late in the development of microprocessors.
So the real questions become:
- How do we isolate a system capable of holding the fabrication knowledge base (to survive all but a world-ending catastrophe). A concrete bunker outside the catastrophe zone with a powered down system, generator, and fuel accomplishes this.
- What is the required publication technology, so that the needed information can be reproduced in a non-electronic matter? A small web-press with appropriate paper supplies, ink, and water would accomplish this, with the appropriate supporting bindery equipment (to make leaflets, brochures, magazines, and books).
- Highly intelligent, ethical people willing to look at and seek to avoid past mistakes (including those inherent in the powered down system, supporting agriculture and trade (for raw materials), and a defending army to allow them to restore the tech base.
Say, sounds something like David Brin's novel The Postman doesn't it? (not the movie version, btw).Obviously the right software needs to be available to the system, with the right i/o devices: we might as well be able to create the litho masks for current transistor technologies rather than returning to the circuit densities of the '60's; C++, Java, and other web tech instead of Cobol and CICS); scanners with OCR as opposed to keypunch machines, etc.)
Hey, I'll provide the cave and the backup systems. Anybody want to lend me a few bazillion dollars to do the rest? *grin*
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
It's easy to recover -- just reinstall Win98, MS PowerPlant Controller 2000, MS NORAD 68, and MS Refinery. Instant civilization!
can YOU still read that old code from your C64?
Yup. I tried it just the other week on my sixteen year-old Commodore 64. Some of the 5 1/4 floppies were dead, but my dog had a good time playing with those.
Spy Hunter still worked, but it was far, far easier than I had remembered... Maybe there actually is a reason why we stopped playing all those games.
Didn't you learn anything when you saw what Ash did in Army of Darkness? Yes! He kept a spare physics book in his trunk of his car.
He also had a shotgun and chainsaw. Clearly, these are important tools for any post-apocolyptic event or survival in medieval times. Would these devices, too, be wiped out by a giant catastrophy? Unlikely at best. There is hope for humanity after all!
But you might ask yourself: "What can I do to help prevent the mass-extinction of all scientific knowledge on the planet?"
The solution is easier than you think: go out this very moment and buy a spare physics book and put it in your car! The key is to be proactive! I suggest schools install physics books in special recepticals with labels that say "Break glass in the event of comprehensive technological erasure." Remember, educating society starts with the education of the minds of the young.
Thank you, and we now return you to your previous ill-concieved brain spew.
Learn from your parents' mistakes: use birth control.
But the majority (75% of world population)
people seem to forget that only 1% of the world owns a computer
I guess 1% + 75% = 100%, eh? Way to go New Math.
Seriously, I believe computer ownership is way above 1%, as that would be 60,000,000 people. If I'm not mistaken some of the latest figures put internet usage alone at around 500,000,000, which would make it just about 10% of the world. Add onto that people who are not online, and those who use computers indirectly.
This event would probably bring a mild blessing- hopefully the western world would see it as a chance to redirect its goals
Heck no, we've got to get our systems back online. You treat "Western world" as a single entity, as if events can be played out in a single mind with a single consciecnce, 'fraid not.
You'd be surprised how much similarity there is between running through dark cellars, fighting for your life with a shotgun and sitting on your fat ass playing computer games and masturbating. Absolutely none; I was amazed.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Suppose YOU had a time machine and got stuck in some medieval time. Would you survive more than a day? What of your advanced technical knowledge would be of any use to you without the advance tools that you honestly couldn't replicate? Would you live like a king or a beggar?
For instance, if I was thrown in the past, I feel that I could live comfortably if I could improve the life and health of a king and his court. Perhaps by building a plumbing or central heating system for his castle. But this always begs the question of where would I get pipes, pumps and ventilation ducts. I usually end up feeling dumber that I like, so I quit thinking about it.
As to the question at hand. The truth is that much of the problems with legacy systems would be reproduced if we had to start from ground zero. How would we produce a transistor without the knowledge and equipment to produce a diode? Once we have the equipment set up to produce transistors and diodes, how quickly do we abandon a machine full of discreet transistor and diodes which is used to make integrated circuits? The problem with legacy systems is not a technological one. It is an economic one, much related to the problem of do you remodel a building or tear down the old and build it new.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If anyone knows of the whereabouts of such a set, I'd be interested in buying it.
- We would still have paper media, and other non-digital archives. The principles behind modern chips and circuits do not have to be reinvented, just rebuilt.
- Only prototypes need be built. We don't have to mass-produce a series of Babbage engines, then vacuum-tube colossi, then generation after generation of PCs. We would need only a few older computers in order to develop newer ones.
- Lots of manpower would be used. Think about the number of IT professionals today who would want to contribute in some way to the effort. Personally, I would much rather contribute to the "great rebuilding" than find some line of work I can do without sitting behind a desk getting fat.
- Think about how much support the project would have from Those In Charge. Whether, post-reboot, this turns out to be a new feudal-style ruling class, the storm troopers Bill Gates has been gathering in his basement or the usual gang of idiots, the members would very likely be interested in putting resources into getting their iMacs back and playing some solitaire.
I think the real question here is not how long it would take to rebuild what we have now, but what we would do differently. Would we keep configurations as they are, or would we pay more attention to forward-compatibility? For instance, I doubt any of the new machines built would have a 5 1/4" floppy drive. Perhaps 3 1/2"s would be pre-empted too, in favour of something along the lines of ZIP or even DVD-RW.The most interesting question to me is, what fundamental changes would be made? Right now there is quite a bit of research done into quantum computing, and into biotech. (I know, because I read it on /.) Would these emerging technologies have any sort of impact on rebuilding our computing infrastructure, or would humanity keep the blinders it's worn for so long and doggedly continue along the same path it was on?
:eof
Hypothetically, if you did not have to rely on supporting any existing standards, and the resulting computers, software, etc, had 100% acceptence by everyone, and ignoring any problems with implementation of such a system including financal ones, how would you build the computers/hardware/chips/software/network for maximum efficiency, usability, and customizability? Further assume that anyone involved in the production of equipment or software for this 'new' computing system are doing it for the benefit of mankind and not to maximize their profit.
Unforunately, if you ask this question now, then again in a year, and then a year after that, the responses would continue to change drastically, because new computing features continue to evolve every year if not sooner. Three to 4 years ago, the concept of Java's virtual engine took hold. XML as a way for extensible data exchange was big, this year peer-to-peer networking is large. Hardware moves just as fast, from chips that know when to run into idle mode, to USB or Firewire devices, to LCD/flat panel monitors. With the Big Reset as the question above poses, we'd definitely want to include such features in the hardware/software design. What's to say that next year, technology "Foobar" will be the next big thing, and then we'll want to include that? But generally, when you include something new on existing standards, it's typically a hack, even if the standard attempted to allocate space for new innovations (The current discussion on the ATA spec and content protection is a good example of this).
The other thing is that while designing such a system 'for the benefit of mankind' is certainly not a problem, the manufactor of hardware and development of software would be controlled by corporate interests in which the last thing on their mind is "for the benefit of mankind". Again, if the standard is written to allow extensibility, no doubt some manufacture will add their extentions without documentation to try to lock the user into their product, or such that two separate products work effectively links but with other vendors, the products are not as effective -- in other words pulling what MS did with Windows and IE. No matter how much talk we do to try to set Big Reset guidelines, companies will do what is best for their bottom dollar.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Unlike some of the other posters, I'm optimistic.
;) to rebuild knowledge of the basics.
After the great earthquake, San Fransisco was rebuilt in a matter of months. Why? Although all the buildings were totalled, the people (well, most of the people) with the know-how to rebuild it were still around.
Fortunately, in the computer business, many of the people who built the first computers are still around. Even if they were gone, humans often strive to greatness in the face of necessity - engineers, physics and computer scientists could work together for once (ie no "sorry, that's a hardware problem..."
How would we do it? Well, I probably don't know enough about hardware to say for sure. At the worst, we could go through the stages we went through the first time, to bootstrap ourselves to the next level, relearning lessons that we didn't think we'd need to know. At best, we can skip some stages (I think basic photolithography could be done without going through the transistor stage).
What would be different? Well, some serious architectural mistakes were made for historical reasons - path dependence and all that (ie the best choice in 1981 may not be the best choice today, but we are locked in by yesterday's decisions). All our chips would probably be RISC VLIW. All COBOL code would be rewritten in Visual BASIC, Java or C++.
However, if we happened to be attacked by aliens while we were rebuilding, well, then all our base would belong to them.
1. Put Bill Gates in a rocket
2. Send the rocket to Pluto
3. Triple the worldwide production of coffee
4. Make sure Bill Gates is still on his way to Pluto.
5. Ask Damian Conway if he could rewrite Perl in Latin (again).
6. Ask project SETI to not listen to the area of the sky near Pluto.
7. Ask Linus Torvalds to rewrite MacOS using only
a piece of wood and some rock.
8. Tell Larry Ellison that if he wants to be as big as Bill Gates, he has to go to Pluto too.
9. Make Richard Stallman the new pope.
10. Make sure those damn monkeys don't get too intelligent.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
This is actually not just something to speculate about - it's already a problem!
Archiving services and institutions have problems with 5 1/4 inch floppies, old cassettes (can YOU still read that old code from your C64?) and tapes from extinct drives.
By now they also have problems with the multitude of different text formats (WP 5.1 anyone?).
Maybe platform independent formats like XML will be the cure...
--
Don't make fun of my speling, english is my 2nd language...
Actually, people used to design chips without computers all the time. Computers are used to make the process more efficient. They are necessary now only because of the extreme complexity of current chips, not because of any inherent need of computers.
Basically, we would re-populate the world in a very similar way that we design a compiler. We would design a very simple computer using very simple gate-level chips that don't need computers to be designed. Then, we would build the computer (it would be as large as a mainframe). We could then use this computer to design a more powerful computer. And so on. This is like compiler design in that a very rudimentary compiler is implemented and then used to compile its own components.
I'm a professional integrated circuit designer, and I can tell you that there are a lot of useful circuits that I could design without a computer. For high performance stuff, of course I would need a powerful computer for extensive simulation, but designers could easily design simple analog and digital circuits without them.
As for the semiconductor processing needed to make these simple chips, a lot of manual fab equipment exists, mostly in university teaching and research labs. While we would have to put the sub-micron fab lines at Intel in storage, I can tell you that we could build simple 2 micron chips by hand at UC Santa Barbara TODAY.
In summary, this is not something to worry about. Because, presumably, human knowledge would not be erased, I think we could bootstrap outselves back to modern technology in about 10 years. It would take that long only because of the many generations of simpler computers used to design more powerful computers required.
"...fries all microprocessors and scrambles the contents of all existing ROMs, disks, CD-ROMs, and any other machine-readable media in all computers. And the same fate falls on all high-tech manufacturing equipment."
Got it. All computers and related machines and materials are toast.
"What would we do differently if we didn't have fifty years worth of legacy systems to continue maintaining?"
THIS is your question?? What would we do differently?? A better question would be HOW. With no computers, try designing (let alone manufacturing) a chip.
Which is why my answer is: we'd be pretty much in the same boat. Things like high-level languages and XML are luxuries afforded by cheap, high-speed computing power. If we had to start over, we'd have to go back to a hardwired computer to design/build a "machine code" one, then use that to build a compiler, etc. It might take less time, but we'd still have to build all the same infrastructure that we build the first time around.
Remember a lot of the "new" technology around today was invented decades ago--but only now became cheap or popular. Computer people in the 50's weren't idiots--they just didn't have computers to help them.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Even though we all know that Bob (or Mr. Abooey to the rest of the trolls) is completely full of shit, he does bring up an interesting point.
The fact is, it would take one hell of a devestating event to cause complete destruction of ALL computers and computer systems. We have government offices/shelters all over the world built deep, deep underground to save the 'important' people in the event of nuclear attack. I would think there would also be at least a few computers present in these shelters. Nobody can imagine living without computers nowadays. And if the end times come, and humanity is wiped out, we want to make sure that the important government officials can still create massive amounts of paperwork in their locked-away shelters. What better way than with computers?
Take that, and the fact that we have a (at least semi) permanent space-station which is probably filled with computer equipment, both high-grade industrial type stuff and commodity PC hardware (don't a lot of astronauts have laptops with them?), anything short of a full-on Earth destroying event (and one that destroys the space station with it) would probably not be able to completely wipe out all computers.
But, if we are talking theoretical, I think it would be a good thing if we had to go back to the beginning. It might make people a little more concious of the fact that there is life outside of computers. Granted, we would all be too busy hunting and fishing to worry about recreating our computers. If all electronics were wiped out, there would be no electricity (aren't all power plants computer controlled?), no cars (how many cars don't have computers in them now?), no TV (OH THE HUMANITY!), no radio, and basically we would be thrust back into a sort of dark ages. The ones to survive would be the ones that can manage to hunt and gather on their own. There would be no massive transports, there would be no infrastructure for government to 'sieze control' in a situation like that. It would be, um, interesting to say the least. And it would serve to clean up the current gene pool a bit.
But, what sort of event would it take to selectively remove all electronics completely from the Earth in such a way that there would be no way to quickly recreate them? I'm having real problems coming up with a possible scenario that doesn't include extinction of all life, at least all human life.
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Living in a third world country I see this everyday. This event would probably bring a mild blessing- hopefully the western world would see it as a chance to redirect its goals