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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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.

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.

"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 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.

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.

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