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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

You're supposed to download it now and keep around. Just like preppers do with MREs and ammunition.

I said this further up the thread, but I'd rather have a raspberry pi, some screen cribbed from a smartphone, and some flash sticks.

Why plan for less than the raspberry pi level?

Because the pi might be needed for more demanding workloads (networks, routing, sdr radio system). With this solution you can build low-tech control systems and programmable switches with a bit of logic where a raspi would be overkill.

But the doomsday scenarios aside, this is super useful as an educational device. It can teach people what computers actually are and how they operate on the lowest possible level.

This is what excites me about this project. Another commenter posted the NandToTetris course, which is along the same lines. Computers/software are so complicated now, so much understanding gets lost in the upper levels of abstraction. Everything just seems like black box magic.

Or you know, a laptop. I've got like 6 of them piling up dust and all they need is 19V. The oldest from 2008, the batteries on 3 have sadly failed being unused, everything else still works.

I've also got 2 desktops from 2003ish (Athlon64 and Pentium III), they probably work, too, although they're stored in a garage (along with some other stuff like VCRs and CRT displays).

Not to mention routers old and new, all running Linux.

Yeah, why plan for less? All I need to do is scavenge around my property :D

Though a garden, livestock and a greenhouse will be a much higher priority. No one needs any sort of computing when they can't eat.

> Or you know, a laptop. I've got like 6 of them piling up dust and all they need is 19V

Mechanical parts fail first. The keyboards on those laptops will be gone after a few years of use. The USB ports won't last much longer. How long will the thermal paste and internal fans last?

The point of the z80 is that they're cheap and relatively easy to build from scavenged parts.

Not sure where you scavenge parts for a z80, I think it's much easier to scavenge parts for PCs. Plus, laptops are way more fixable than you seem to think, with simple soldering. Fans can be kept going for years with grease. External keyboards are ubiquitous. It's strange how people here bang on about RPi when a simple laptop is even more flexible.

And I'm also thinking more of a "repository of knowledge" use, not just simple controllers.

> Not sure where you scavenge parts for a z80,

TI calculators, microcontrollers, and more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80#Embedded_systems_and...

> I think it's much easier to scavenge parts for PCs. Plus, laptops are way more fixable than you seem to think, with simple soldering. Fans can be kept going for years with grease.

Collapse OS is talking about timelines of a century or more. Non-mechanical computers are the only ones that will last that long without the supporting infrastructure.

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