A New Old Idea; Permacomputing

It used to be that we bought books, and they accumulated (and we sometimes even used them again) until your heirs had to get rid of them. Now we read things online, and the disks are wiped when our heirs get rid of them. We've always been consuming more than we're producing.

What would be nice is to be able to ingest content as before, but have it all stored automatically, then made searchable. I'm told that this is available[1] for a Mac based machine. I'd like it more generally available.

The point of having books, or notes, is to be able to retrieve information with context. We now have tools that can summarize and categorize things automatically. If we, as a hive mind, can add just a little bit of multidimensional voting/tagging to the things we see, along with their cryptographic checksum and consent mechanisms, we could collectively organize everything we see with almost zero individual effort.

Vannevar Bush's vision for the Memex runs afoul of copyright laws, this might be a way to route around them a bit.

[1] https://www.rewind.ai/

There's a lot to tell about how things were and how they digressed. Beside the physical aspect or ergonomics, there was something calming of a very small core software. Powering an old machine throwing you into a BASIC shell in one second is relaxing. Modern day suffers from the paradox of choice, too many things to digest, too many variants, too much stuff you never gets to understand.

There were also more 'mystical' aspects to old machines, they were slow but fit your brain more, you can't swallow the whole internet .. you need time, those machines being limited, gave you time to think, they also had their own peculiar mechanics, and it made for a nice ritual (told that before but the pleasure of hearing a tape drive ramping up, a LP deck spinning.. it all feeds your brain with a soothing feeling)

I definitely understand what they mean by a fork, at some point I stopped using computers with explicit purpose and now it can be doing, or just consuming. I think that was the fork, when computers became entertainment and consumptive devices as well as tools for doing.

I have a specific workststion for music production, work, and games, and I think that was an attempt to make each workstation more purposeful and less consumptive.

When I find myself on my phone too much, I try and switch back to only using it when I need to complete a task. But they are very good at sucking you back in.

To the permanence part of the article, I think that is what attracts me about embedded devices. You build it, and it works until it breaks, rather than until the complex alignment of software dependencies misaligns against your codebase or hardware.

There are a lot of people recycling this particular idea and typically they will end up sticking a Raspberry Pi (assuming they can get it) into an enclosure that serves the intended purpose. You can then use the base OS to hack around on it until it looks and feels like the device you would like to have. Some of these are very impressive.

One example: (there are 100's)

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/scripto-distraction-free-wr...

All nice things eventually end and current world peace will probably end one day too. If we want to preserve our technological advancements through civilisation ending disasters then people should start working on enabling anyone to manufacture chips easily. Something like 3D printing revolution but for silicon. Only then Open Hardware initiatives will really make sense.

Sorry, but I don't get it:

>What drew me to old computers, and what still draws me to them after all these years, is the sense that people who used them new had a different faith in them: of computers as a tool for thought, as something that people could use to accomplish something new. The idea of computers as “the bicycle for the mind” felt like a lost future

Didn't we accomplish all that and some? Isn't a modern smartphone the best "bicycle of the mind" we could 've imagined in 1990s?

Sure there are disadvantages. I would love a large(cheap) eink display as much as the next guy. I'm also a big fan of retro computing. I still have my commodore 64, a 386sx,a slot1 windows 98 pc and more. I like all of them, but I would never give up my modern Ryzen PC with a nVidia 2070(yes,not newest, but pretty powerful), nvme drives and fast ram for something with less capability.

We have all this and at the same time we have single board computers and 8 bit microcontrollers where they are appropriate.

If not for the current "price gouger paradise" conditions I would say we have it the best it ever was computing wise.

The only things I miss from the past are two aspects of software development. First, it was much easier to understand "everything" about a computer back then when few tens of kB was a large program. Second, it seems programs were written to work well on current not future hardware.

Also, before Windows showed up there was an almost a decade long time period when a typical pc did everything a typical user wanted. There was little point to upgrade the hardware back then. Remember new computers sold towards the end of that time had a special button to slow them down! (hilariously named turbo). Only once graphical interfaces became a thing faster and faster PCs started selling. There is a certain comfort for a programmer to be able to make software for one machine for a decade. You can really get to know it well... Now? You can't even get one Android API to know well before they change it 180 degrees. This even starts to extend to programming languages. Despite android running a java virtual machine, java(and C) is no longer sufficient to use all features of the platform. Now, we have to switch to Kotlin to use certain concurrency features etc. I think the pace of change in this has direct impact on overall software quality we have now

FWIW, I'm building a simple 32-bit computer system based on Prof. Wirth's Oberon RISC CPU and a simple language called Joy that combines the best parts of Forth and Lisp.

The primary motivation is to avoid unnecessary complexity. But there's also a Permacomputing angle.

Permaculture is a school of thought about what might be called the art and science of applied ecology.

From that POV the main concerns of ecology in re: computers would be efficiency and reducing environmental load of making chips, etc.

The other common theme seems to be a kind of post-apocalypse computing (e.g. Collapse OS).

I don't really know where I'm going with this... Simpler computers would presumable be more efficient and easier to make?

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Really, the crucial thing from my personal POV is the reduction of complexity. I'm pretty sure that that's the primary measure of the durability of our large global interconnected economies: "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler." :)

I also jotted down my experience so far: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235

eInk has to low refresh rate to be able to watch video or play games.

12v IPS screen is a better alternative.

A long-lasting device, with similarly long-term, reliable storage, will likely cost a fortune to produce, if it can even be done at all. One of the issues preventing electronics from lasting that long will probably be whisker growth: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Examination-of-tin-whi...

I went into the article under the impression that permacomputing was a form of computation resilient to change over time, something akin to markdown or plain text files. I missed a more clear definition in the text.

Honestly, I think this concept applies to mobile phones for children too. A solid phone that does the basics without a camera or bloatware. Couple that with limited access to the internet and app store.

The purpose of cell phones, in this context, is to keep children safe. They fail to accomplish the task.