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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Is it possible to live without computers? Yes, but you don't want to.
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.
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.
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...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-...