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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

If it gets the job done, it gets the job done.

One of the CNC machines in our workshop was controlled by a MicroVAX until recently. Did what we asked it to.

Right there is the problem with a lot of newer things. It does things other than what you ask it to, like upload telemetry, consume your bandwidth to deliver advertisements, or reboot for updates.

The problem is when it stops doing its job.

How much are Apple II parts? How easy is it to find people with the know-how? How much do they charge? How about 10 years from now?

Long term tech is hard. We haven't had time to figure it out yet.

The Apple II is one of a few computers that you could build a brand new one from parts if needed, they're not complex machines.

or run on an emulator

the article makes it clear that you need to interact with special cards to control the exhibits

That problem could probably be solved using an FPGA (or even simpler tech)

Given the specs, an AVR could do it.

How easy is it to find people with the know-how? How much do they charge?

I'd think you'd find dozens of qualified volunteers willing to work pro-bono to keep a Apple ][-powered museum running.

How about 10 years from now?

You'd find slightly fewer.

Still safe to leave the old stuff running if they get the job done and you don't want to add any new feature to it. And make sure you build your new stuff on a future proof platform.

It really depends on the roadmap.

I do worry that the power consumption might be far too high for the amount of value you're getting out of it. I mean, a Raspberry Pi Zero probably has more computing power than an Apple II, while using a small fraction of the power. You could probably retrofit the software to work relatively well on an Apple II emulator on the Raspberry Pi, for that matter.

Increasingly I've been getting a bit worried about these "it gets the job done" mentalities; are the environmental externalities actually being properly accounted for?

The cost of rewriting the software will surpass any energy costs of the working solution. Not to mention crafting the new hardware and utilizing old computer will harm ecology too.

Well, as I said, potentially an Apple II emulator might actually do the job depending on what the software is doing.

This might be a fun thing to compute the numbers on.

> The Apple II personal computer was introduced in 1977. One of its features was a compact, fanless switching power supply, which provided 38W of power at 5, 12, -5, and -12 volts

Unless you are using Apple 2 emulator on Raspberry Pi, you won't get any modern computer working on 38W.

Actually it has less power consumption than a lightbulb that is needed to light up the room where it stands.

That's not really true. Pretty much any laptop these days will use less power -- much less if the display is off and it's not doing anything particularly demanding.

> you won't get any modern computer working on 38W

Nitpicking, half of modern laptops consume something close to that, e.g. surface pro 4 36W, macbook air 30W.

Considering that a CNC mill almost certainly has a custom hardware interface, its unlikely its possible to emulate with any kind of existing emulator.

Sure, but what's the carbon output to recycle the Apple II? What's the carbon output to build new rPIs? What's the carbon output to rebuild whatever software to run on the rPI?

Until we can measure these things with extreme precision, it's kind of a shot in the dark. You might be able to make some estimate of it currently, and then you could graph the cost of making an rpi and recycling the Apple II vs the power usage of the Apple II over time (- the power usage of an rpi).

So I agree with you, but there are externalities to replacing the Apple II with an rpi that need to be accounted for as well.

This would be a cool data experiment.

If the museum is unchanged since 1987, then presumably the central heating (and the lightbulbs!) would be much juicier places to go looking for fat to trim.

It never crossed my mind, in 30+ years living in Moscow, that you can get off central heating, but you actually can![0] - although, it's unpractical for a private owner, living in the city.

But the museum in question is a village house, I'm pretty sure they don't have central heating.

[0] (in Russian) https://www.garant.ru/news/1155577/

Isn't central heating more efficient than private heating though? Central heating usually works by using heat from a nearby power station, which would otherwise have been wasted, no?

Heating costs me about as much as if I ran a 1kWh setup 24*7 for my 56m2 apartment. Short googling suggests, that I could do better on my own, but not so much better to actually do anything about it.

Efficiency of any infrastructure depends on it's physical condition, and technocratic abilities[0] of local governments; both are ok where I live, but mostly much worse in smaller cities.

[0] for the lack of better terminology. I can't talk about "quality" of Mayor's work in general, for it should include not stealing votes, representing actual people etc.

Interesting figures. BTW, the terminology is a mess, but I think what you're describing would most clearly be called "district heating", as "central" often just means that your house has one burner in the basement (as opposed to a fireplace in each room, originally). I hadn't stopped to think what the museum would have.

And, somewhere in here there's a parable about capitalism. The engineers are correct that the district heating plant has economies of scale... but it's only as clean as your town's politics, and even a squeaky-clean mayor has to make a terrifying giant decision about whether to upgrade it, once every 30 years. Instead of every owner gossiping with his neighbors about what works & what breaks, and whether double glazing was worth it.

Yeah because we all got usb, wifi, bluetooth and run x86 those times. Better start worrying why most people still commute single in cars to work they could do while sitting in their homes.

> I mean, a Raspberry Pi Zero probably has more computing power than an Apple II

Probably? A single raspberry pi zero can do more calculations per second than every Apple II ever manufactured put together.

Edit: sorry, had a brain fart. You would need more like 100 pi zeroes.

"I do worry that the power consumption might be far too high for the amount of value you're getting out of it."

Those processors barely used any power to begin with. Most don't even have a heat sink. None of my systems had a heat sink until my 80386.

yeah worked with a win3.1 box for a long time that was never shutdown on purpose (on a ups and we had back up generators). we ran midi tests of our hw with it. it was shutdown permanently in some time in 2010.

Aren't newer CNC machines much more effective,and slowly replacing older machines ?

CNC is a way to control a tool, and the tools that can be controlled are so wide ranging that it's weird to talk about the efficacy of CNC, rather than the capabilities of the tool you're controlling.

Many CNC machines in operation are retrofits of WWII era manual lathes and mills. There are so many of those still in existence, and the demand for small scale machining is so small in the US these days that the market for high quality machining tools have effectively segmented into huge modern CNC machining centers worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, and many decades old refurbished tools for small scale, simple one offs and hobbyist tools.

Sometimes, sometimes not. CNC (as someone noted) is just a control mechanism. For some use cases, the cams and levers of a World War II-era Screw Machine are faster and far more cost effective than a new, or even used CNC mill/lathe.

There are shops out there that will buy up old automated machine tools and dedicate each machine to a particular setup or product that they make in bulk. That 60 year-old hunk of cast iron and steel might have cost an eyewatering sum when it was new, but because CNC is all the rage now, it's available for the cost of scrap now and it may still be as precise as the day it was built.

Exactly what I wanted to post.

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