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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Great to see alternatives.

A tangent, but bear with me: after finishing the really good book The End of the World is Just Beginning, I think it makes a lot of sense to continue building cutting edge tech that requires international supply chains, BUT, also having locally manufactured tech good enough to power locally sourced computers, run tractors, etc. International supply chains have enriched many areas of the planet but to assume that they will last seems very risky. Always have a Plan B.

EDIT: call this Plan B Tech

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Plan B is also vital for computer freedom. In an ideal world, we would be able to make good enough chips at home, just like we can make software at home. Chip fabrication currently costs billions of dollars, they are therefore centralized operations vulnerable to regulation. Ability to make computers at home would preempt any attempt to regulate encryption, for example.

Nice! And in this ideal world, we could also make steel tools in our decentralised garden furnaces. The steel industry costs the world billions of dollar currently, imagine if we could all make our own iron tools without paying for patents e.g. torx head screw drivers from our back yard! :^)

That is totally possible though. Plenty of people know metal working and can make tools such as knives. It's not as efficient as industrial mass production but it's possible.

I think the tongue in the cheek comes from a historical context that exactly this was attempted in the Great Leap Forward movement, as part of the Great Cultural Revolution movement in Communist China, which was, as with anything Communist, a huge leap and huge progress backwards.

I'm not educated about chinese history but I will read about it. I'd like to clarify that I don't mean anything radical like replacing fabs with home production. Free software never replaced software companies, they coexist.

I just wish it was possible so that we always have the means to produce 100% freedom-respecting general purpose computer hardware that's viable for daily use. That way we're not forced to accept the status quo when corporations start bundling suspicious stuff like IME into their processors.

We already have the means to produce freedom respecting software ourselves but that gets us nowhere if the chip makers start requiring cryptographic signatures before executing software. What good is free software if we can't run it?

It might not be this easy. The dilemma is this: if the company produces good product, then they will probably gaining market beyond just regional.

The international supply chains of today's world was grown organically, driven by the market where inferior company and their products gets replaced by better (sometime just slightly) ones.

However, I do agree that a Plan B is required in many fields, but I guess you need huge amount of government subsidies to keep them running.

One way to do this is to make domestic production a requirement for government contracts. Then the government contracts ensure domestic production exists, and pays off a lot of their fixed costs, which may make them competitive in the global market. Or maybe competitors are still cheaper.

But more than one country can do this, which ensures supply chain diversity. And if one of them falters, the others may be more expensive, but they exist.

Then people will complain about government waste and using out of date tech.

> The international supply chains of today's world was grown organically, driven by the market where inferior company and their products gets replaced by better (sometime just slightly) ones.

I would say corruption played an important part, especially in Eastern europe. MS products are expensive for poor countries. Coca cola without "exclusive deals" would not have the same market share (Hello wrigley, hello lindt, hello intel). The shitty bananas in Europe have nothing to do with organic growing of the market.

To me it seems that Risc-V is China's 'plan-B', their systems are the first to use it and SBC's do exist already in China. I've even seen IoT cores from Chinese vendors moving to Risc-V, like the popular ESP32 from Shanghai company Espressif.

AFAIK Allwinner is a Chinese company and the C906 core is an open source core made by Alibaba.

AFAIK C906 is not open-source. The open-source variant of C906 is called OpenC906, and we don't know the eventual difference between C906 and OpenC906.

Even if the C906 and OpenC906 were the same there would be no way to verify that the cores implemented in the hardware you receive are the same as those described anyway.

I'd agree, and I'd say that RISC-V's rise has much to do with this sentiment.

An open source patent/trade-agreement unencumbered architecture is of great interest to many countries for precisely the reason that they can build it locally yet harvest innovation from across the pond (without paying a foreign company).

It is plan B if you live in China. The West is not under treath to lose access to ARM.

I doubt it will come to fruition though; in ten years our world be more globalised than it is today. Trade wars, the pandemic and even the Ukraine war are short bumps on a big fundamental trend that is here to stay.

To what extent do we need computers? They feel indispensable but we could go back to more labor intensive information systems. And that wouldnt be all bad.

It's a good question, if we didn't have small microprocessors the alternatives would tend to be more material intensive (eg mechanical governors or clockwork) or be less efficient.

We'd lose the Internet and cellphones, have to go back to mechanical telephone exchanges.

I think we would miss CNC a lot, it's how the majority of production work gets done now in many industries, the manual machines are in the corner for one-offs.

The computer controlled machines also tend to be making parts or doing QC or measurement to support the non computerised ones. So sure your injection moulder or die cutter might not need too many chips but wait until the molds and tooling wear out.

Although who can send your factory orders anyway...

Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. Small words but huge implications.

We'd lose basically all capacity to print (billboards, t-shirts, books, office memos etc) , which seems bad. Like we had less digital ways to do all that stuff but they went away. It's not easy to go back.

Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray.

Behind the scenes all kinds of process control would disappear which would require massive rework. We'd have to retool most industrial processes to get computers out of the control loops. We'd lose the electric grid until people figured out how to decomputerise it. Probably trains, traffic lights, airlines, cars, shipping would be impacted in a variety of fundamental ways.

The postal service would need to be re-architected (current reliance on parcel sorters and scanners).

We'd have to move back to analog tv, radio and media production workflows would change dramatically.

It's an interesting exercise to try and figure out what industries would hurt the most if chips disappeared tomorrow, I'm pretty sure it would be a catastrophe but it's not easy to follow it all through.

Mechanical solutions tend to be slower and also less reliable (more moving parts = more points of failure)

Aviation would just cease to function, nearly every commercial airliner is heavily dependent on computer control, to say nothing of things like the reservation systems that are also very complex (pricing flights is a very complex use case for algorithms)

Airplanes do predate computers, and there are plenty of airlines still flying that remain operable without electric power, even some commercial airliners.

Operable in an emergency, and reasonable to do for normal daily operations, are two very different things.

True, but if "without computers" became the norm (with a good lead up time), then ways to make it work sounds like it could happen.

Maybe, but you're talking about "a generation, or more" kind of lead time. For a good start you have roughly no pilots able to safely fly your computer-free planes and no instructors either. So once you've managed to design the controls, you need to bootstrap your education pipeline on using them.

I think you're imagining that current airliners and current flight instruction work very differently than they actually do. A very large fraction of flight instruction is carried out in planes that predate the embedded-computers era, starting in roughly 01975, and the more recent planes that carry most commercial air traffic are designed to simulate those computer-free planes as closely as possible.

Yeah, maybe there would be a huge spike in aviation risk, so instead of one flight in ten million crashing, one flight in a hundred thousand would crash, but that's still not enough for aviation to become a dominant cause of death for weekly business air commuters. People would freak out when they watched the news but only in countries that hand over the reins of society to nervous nellies would it be a real obstacle to aviation.

I was actually thinking about the thing you mentioned. While the flight properties of modern planes kept changing, we were using computers to emulate flying like a half a century old much smaller plane. Now that emulation would be gone.

Computers also eliminated the flight engineer position. So at the very least flying would be much more costly.

Um, what's with the 5 digit year dates? It makes reading your comments a pita. :(

Condolences.

Concorde is largely steampunk.

Concorde is literally a museum piece that hasn't flown in 20 years, because even in retirement it was extremely old, and it is extremely noisy and gas-guzzling.

Payments, payroll, inventory, invoicing. ...

This was widely done with tube computers in the 1950s. The first commercial computer, Univac, was introduced in 1951.

Medical imaging gone except for maybe the x-ray.

The first commercial CT scanner in the 1970s used a Data General Nova minicomputer, which used small-scale integrated circuit logic chips, but did not include a microprocessor.

Behind the scenes all kinds of process control would disappear ...

The early PDP-8 minicomputers introduced in 1965 used discrete transitors, no integrated circuits. They were used in industrial control applications.

CNC/NC predates the microprocessor. It just wasn't practical for wide scale use without CAD.

Personally I’d love to return to hand painted signs and advertising for businesses.

IMO they have way more character but also it would be harder to slap up giant billboards for products and services I’m not interested in.

Slightly terrifying if you ponder the implications of a significant solar flare hitting the planet in this day and age.

Farmers use GPS and other technologies to plant crops with inch-level accuracy while maximizing land utilization and minimizing fuel/fertilizer. Take that away and somebody's going to starve (or start a war to keep from starving). This might play out in Africa soon with the collapse of Ukrainian grain imports.

And then they till the soil and let most of their money (fertilizer) run off (erosion).

We need chips in everything. Cars could work without them but would be much less efficient and bad for the environnement. Lots of very important medical devices rely on chips or full computers. I would like to see the media industry roll back to a lower tech leaving only the big and very bias information go through. Imagine how hard it would be to keep them accountable.

Is it possible to live without computers? Yes, but you don't want to.

I feel like that's true, but the scale is misleading. We could run most of the things we need with very small chips production. A lot of usage could be removed (most of entertainment), lots of business use could be scaled down (how many businesses need basically a spreadsheet and a filing system equivalent). There will be special usage requiring hitech chips or course. But we can seriously scale down our electronics usage without a negative civilisation impact. The pocket device I write this on has enough power to run what an office of 10 people needs to properly run if we adjust the software to match.

If processors were much more interchangeable than they are, we could scavenge chips from less important devices, or at least production that was destined for them, and put them in more important ones. I hope RISC-V can help provide this kind of buffer against short term shocks. For major civilizational collapse where we can't even build new fabs, then we probably won't have much need for new chips anyway, so it's moot.

> Cars could work without them but would be much less efficient and bad for the environnement.

Not as much as you think. Modern cars aren't a whole lot more efficient than and are just about as clean as they were 30 years ago. Most of the electronics in modern cars is for relatively useless stuff like lane keeping assist and that thing that makes the indicators blink in a cool pattern.

You can have cars just as clean as modern ones with 1980s-level microcontrollers in the ECUs. You don't even really need catalytic converters, either, because the closed-loop fuelling systems that use a lambda sensor to measure how complete combustion is.

We could rid cities of pollution right now, completely, by converting all the internal combustion engine vehicles to run on propane instead of petrol or diesel. This doesn't make finance companies or car companies any money, so it won't happen.

You don't need chips for computers. Until the mid-1960s no computers used chips. The early PDP-8 models (introduced beginning in 1965) were desktop minicomputers made entirely with discrete transistors and magnetic core memories. They were used in lots of automated process-control applications.

There is some confusion in this question and many of the reponses here between any electronics (computation and control using tubes dates from WWII at least), transistors (which became widely available in the mid-1950s, all-transistor computers reached the market in 1959), small scale integrated circuits that contained (for example) several logic gates or a few flip-flops (which reached the market in the mid-late 1960s) which were used to build computers but also many simpler electronic control devices, and finally microprocessors which finally reached the market about 1975.

Any electronics that reached the market before the mid or late 1970s did not use microprocessors. For example, the first commercial CT scanner used a Data General Nova minicomputer, which used small-scale integrated circuit logic gates, but did not use a microprocessor. The original Pong arcade game used around 60 small-scale integrated circuit logic gates, but no microprocessor.

If we didn't have integrated circuits, but were stuck with 1959 discrete transistors, or we didn't have microprocessors, but were stuck with 1974 small-scale integrated circuits, we could still have a pretty hi-tech world. There would be more emphasis on optimized design of special-purpose devices - that original Pong game is an example.

Something happened in the 1950s - 1960s economically. [1] It is really as remarkable in its own right, as the industrial revolution had been. The rate of economic growth, slow but steady since the industrial revolution, started to accelerate.

It's impossible to really quantify this kind of thing, probably. And the causes were numerous (it's also an era of relative peace, for example). Still. I've always suspected much, maybe most of it, is due to to a mix of telecommunications, computer automation, and computer-based knowledge-amplification.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/exports/GDP-per-capita-in...

The point you're making is more visible in log form:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-...

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