I don't think just developing a Z80 operating system is enough. The whole ecosystem needs to be preserved.
In agriculture, we have the doomsday seed vault [0] just for this purpose. If we anticipate collapse of the current economic system or society, I think we should build a doomsday computer vault, that keeps everything we need to rebuild the computing industry in a underground bunker. It keeps everything we need in a controlled environment, such as 8080, Z80, m68k, motherboards, logic chips, I/O controllers, ROM/RAM, generic electronic parts, soldering irons, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, schematics, documentation, textbooks, software. We also keep some complete, standalone computer systems such as desktops and laptops, and all the parts that need to service them. We also need to preserve the old semiconductor production lines around the world, although probably not in the same bunker. Even if we fail to build better systems, 8080s are already useful enough!
Meanwhile in peace time, we need to form a team of experts that makes a roadmap to rebootstrap the computing technology for the future using parts from the bunker, with a step-by-step plan, that can be easily followed and executed.
Indeed. It takes a civilisation to build an iPhone.
I don't think people appreciate that even within the highest-tech manufacturing industries there is a lot of tacit knowledge. People shake their fists about "technology transfer" to China, and before that Japan; but that's taken decades for them to reach parity. And that's with running, copyable examples and all the parts of an existing supply chain widely available. Similarly the process for making a nuclear bomb can be written in a short paper, but few countries have successfully replicated it.
"Post-collapse recovery" and "technology transfer" are the same problem, except that post-collapse recovery is cribbing from a dead example rather than a live one and in much worse circumstances.
Collapse recovery is a fun little competence fantasy to play out in your own head. Like "the rapture" for atheists. But within our lifetimes, we have to put in the work to avoid the collapse.
The point here is that we don't need to build an iPhone, we only need a radio. Building a 8080 is much simpler, the USSR did it, the East Germany did it, China did it, all around the same time without too much difficulty. It's certainly would be much more difficult if the current civilization collapsed, but I think the author doesn't anticipate a total collapse, just a breakdown of the current economic system, thus it should be doable.
> Similarly the process for making a nuclear bomb can be written in a short paper, but few countries have successfully replicated it.
My understanding is that the physics of achieving the nuclear explosion itself is relatively straightforward. The real difficulties are to produce the weapon-grade materials needed, and to transform the explosion to an useful weapon, all under external sanctions, and even sabotage.
Taiwan had a nuclear weapon project in 1970s, significant progress was made in the beginning, if the U.S. didn't discover it and dismantle everything, it would be interesting to see how it turned out to be.
As the author themselves admits, this requires a very narrow band of Goldilocks catastrophe. Not catastrophic enough that you still have electricity, but catastrophic enough that all the plants on this list are destroyed or rendered unusable or embargoed from you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
How is that going to work exactly?
No, it's a fantasy disaster, like Day of the Triffids and all the other John Wyndham style "cozy catastrophe" novels.
Real catastrophe is slow and grinding. Think "decline and fall of the Roman Empire" - a multi-lifetime process. Or something like Venezuela, where crumbling power infrastructure took out their aluminium smelter. This causes it to freeze solid and is unrecoverable without rebuilding the crucibles.
Tainter-style collapse over what time period, though? One of his examples seems to be the Roman Empire, which depending on how you measure it took over a hundred years.
Not sure about the Soviet Union, but East Germany had to "import" complete production lines from Western Germany in order to bootstrap their chip production. Of course the West prohibited exporting such sensible technology to the East, and there's some wild stories around involving the secret service, setting up a proxy chip manufacturing company in Western Germany, shutting this down, and "losing" the production lines, which showed up a few months later in East Germany.
But there will be plenty of Z80 and other 8-bit chips to scavenge after a civilizational collapse, and those chips are simple and slow enough to be used in computers built from breadboards and wires.
I don't have any really watertight first hand info unfortunately, only bits and pieces I stumbled over in German internet forums when I've been researching stuff for emulator coding.
Some of the stories of how Western machinery was procured is mentioned from time to time in articles like this one:
It seems to have been less "broad sweep style" than I mentioned above though, more like that new products required specialized machines which were only produced by a handful Western manufacturers, and which were under the CoCom embargo. And the "grey-importing" of those machines went through various shadow companies in different countries to cover everything up.
> “A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in,” she told the Guardian. Fortunately, the meltwater did not reach the vault itself, the ice has been hacked out, and the precious seeds remain safe for now at the required storage temperature of -18C.
"The vault managers are now taking precautions, including major work to waterproof the 100m-long tunnel into the mountain and digging trenches into the mountainside to channel meltwater and rain away. They have also removed electrical equipment from the tunnel that produced some heat and installed pumps in the vault itself in case of a future flood."
Oh, no. I can’t believe it’s gotten this bad. I’m amazed we haven’t done much in the way of climate change control. It’s going to be too late very, very soon.
Climate models indicate it's not too late to avoid a 2°C average temperature increase by 2100 if our energy matrix and heavy industries (concrete, steel and fertilizers) move away from fossil fuels. This takes political conviction and government policy, which in turn requires correct understanding of the situation.
"it's too late" is a dangerous statement because it suggests actions no longer matter. And if no action is taken, several climate models project >4 °C average warming. The majority of the planet will be become uninhabitable at the current human density levels, with billions of people having to relocate and/or die.
Isn't our best course of action to achieve technological progress and fix the situation instead of 'preventing' it?
Like build dikes around low lying areas rather than trying to coordinate a worldwide slowdown of economic activity which faces the worst outcome of prisoner's dilemma.
it's extremely difficult to build waterproof subterranean buildings, especially if they're built into permafrost (which seems these days to be more like tempofrost). this very long but fascinating video discusses it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY
Especially that the people who will restart from a Z80 will face technological edges when their skills and needs grow.
We faced the same in the 80's: going from 8 bit to 16, then 32, having memory addressing problems, being pushed to new and hardly compatible architectures, having programs to rewrite...
Then why not leaving behind us a technology, still simple, but that will save them most of these issues?
I feel an 8-bit data bus and 32-bit address bus would be a good way to make long-live programs, edge-free when extending memories, and still not so complex processors and main boards. The address bus does not need to be fully wired in the first processor versions, so it can scale over time with more complex processors when skills and needs grow.
Besides, it would be smart to leave in a vault a kind of FPGA technology with sources to flash the FPGA components. So no need to create a production line for many different integrated components: only one output, and the components are specialized by flashing them.
Indeed even microprocessors can be flashed on an FPGA.
This is already being done in some places, eg libraries and museums, it's called Digital Preservation, although it's for normal curatorial purposes rather than Doomsday scenarios.
While the focus is on the data, it also necessarily involves access to original hardware at times, which is additionally also often stored for curatorial purposes in its own right.
I'm pretty sure the internet, PDFs...etc fail heavily next to the printed form in the case of a complete collapse. As long as people can read, books should be good for this purpose.
I'd like to see a log being kept in orbit. Like every 10 years it's rotated (FIFO, oldest comes down, new one is launched) with a large delta so that it might survive our current civilization in case of global / climate craziness.
Most likely the source of the end of the world is going to be the Sun throwing a X class solar flare at us and just frying everything in its path.
What you need is a super-deep immortal vault that isn't anywhere near any known fault lines, and who's ingress point is sufficiently above ground, and can be accessed safely if under water, and supplies its own electricity for thousands of years.
Everything outside of the facility will have to be electrically neural up to extreme voltages (due to the possibility of plasma storms arising that make the worst thunderstorms on Earth look like a nice day outside).
I remember reading a worldbuilding stack exchange question about what would be left of mankind in millions of years, were we to disappear today.
The unanimous response was "not much". Mostly anomalously concentrated resources. So... if they are right, even though we have no reason to believe there was a developed civilization before us, it's not that crazy to merely entertain the possibility.
Isn't the moon protected even less from solar flares?
How deep would you need yo build something on the moon for it to be protected, compared to on earth?
The satellites orbit would naturally decay to the point of reentry. I'm not sure of the engineering, but it might be possible to do a controlled descent to a specific place for survivors to rendezvous with.
I could see that causing a huge poo-storm. If our supply chains collapse and all this knowledge is lost... but, we know when and where the knowledge will be returned to the Earth.... then that location is going to be ground zero for a lot of turmoil. Everyone will know that whoever gets that returned knowledge will have dominion.
If it’s just data on them, why not VERY MANY of them, so that they remain in living legend. With slightly different orbits so they deorbit all over the globe, a number of a year for decades or centuries.
Controlled descent is not necessary if they are built to last.
I think about this all the time. A technology vault to take people from the water wheel to the Z80 would be smart. Expensive and I hope never needed, but there is a lot at risk.
Technology evolves so fast that a tech vault would become obsolete very fast. People in the future may not know how to deal with such obsolete technology. Technology also degrades over time. Unlike seeds you cant "freeze" technology to keep it from degrading. At least I dont know how.
The embryo of this idea is in Software Heritage [0]. It's a great project, well worth supporting. Of course this doesn't include the requirement to store and maintain hardware, and even though we can store well-written documents detailing how to build these sorts of machines from scratch, it might not be feasible for post-disaster societies to do this.
I disagree. If humanity collapses, and a new fledgling civilisation grows out of the ashes, then maybe we should let them follow their own path, and make their own discoveries and mistakes.
It's massive hubris to assume that future generations can only survive if they have access to our knowledge.
Many civilisations have fallen only to be replaced by newer betters ones, even when they've had no previous records to refer to.
We're just a stepping stone along the path of human evolution, we are no greater or lesser than the stones before us, or the stones that come after us.
This is one of my concerns. If there is a large-scale collapse, that is a very concrete statement of "what you tried did not work." Preserving as much of that past as possible would be a mistake. Any large collapse should be an opportunity for rebirth. We already drag along old mistakes in the technology industry after many repeated attempts at a fresh start always failing to a competitor offering to hack in backwards-compatibility making the initial deployment easier.
A collapse would be the perfect and likely sole opportunity to ditch the mistakes of the past and forge something completely new with the benefit of a "foresight" forged from hindsight.
I like the idea. But I ask (not being annoying), do we really need it? Seems like having all of that more distributed in the hands of users would be a better protection against unavailability.
Usually the idea behind a doomsday vault is that you're keeping everything securely in one place in case there is widespread disaster that sufficiently wipes out the distributed knowledge. They're not mutually exclusive.
And to expand on this: ideally we wouldn't have just one repository of hardware and knowledge of how to use/recreate that hardware, just like how ideally we wouldn't have just one repository of seeds and knowledge of how to plant/cultivate those seeds. We should be aiming to have as many redundant Svalbard-style doomsday vaults as possible, for all sorts of things (seeds, computers, medicine, you name it).
In agriculture, we have the doomsday seed vault [0] just for this purpose. If we anticipate collapse of the current economic system or society, I think we should build a doomsday computer vault, that keeps everything we need to rebuild the computing industry in a underground bunker. It keeps everything we need in a controlled environment, such as 8080, Z80, m68k, motherboards, logic chips, I/O controllers, ROM/RAM, generic electronic parts, soldering irons, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, schematics, documentation, textbooks, software. We also keep some complete, standalone computer systems such as desktops and laptops, and all the parts that need to service them. We also need to preserve the old semiconductor production lines around the world, although probably not in the same bunker. Even if we fail to build better systems, 8080s are already useful enough!
Meanwhile in peace time, we need to form a team of experts that makes a roadmap to rebootstrap the computing technology for the future using parts from the bunker, with a step-by-step plan, that can be easily followed and executed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault