> For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now.
Vacuum tubes are still made. They’re used extensively in instrument amplification.
But I think this bolsters your point!
Vacuum tubes are still made. They’re used extensively in instrument amplification.
But I think this bolsters your point!
If there were some kind of interdiction on silicon (an evil genie or some kind of Butlerian Jihad perhaps?), the market would remember and/or rediscover the thermoelectric effect and throw money/postapocalyptic bartered goods at glassblowers pretty sharpish.
If that status continued, I'm sure we'd see developments in that space in terms of miniaturisation, robustness, efficiency, performance, etc., that would seem as improbable to us as a modern CPU would seem to someone in the no-silicon timeline. You may never get to "most of a teraflops in your pocket, runs all day on 4000mAh and costs three figures" but you could still do a meaningfully large amount of computation with valves.
Savant-tier, obsessive, dedicates his life to it "guy" does it in his garage over a period of how many years, and has succeeded to what point yet? Has he managed even a single little 8-bit or even 4-bit cpu? I'm cheering that guy on, you know, but he's hardly cranking out the next-gen GPUs.
>the market would remember
Markets don't remember squat. The market might try to re-discover, but this shit's path dependent. Re-discovery isn't guaranteed, and it's even less likely when a civilization that is desperate to have previously-manufacturable technology can't afford to dump trillions of dollars of research into it because it's also a poor civilization due to its inability to manufacture these things.
As I said, you probably won't ever get to where we are now with the technology, but then again probably 99.999% of computing power is wasted on gimmicks and inefficiency. Probably more these days. You could certainly run a vaguely modern society on only electromechanical and thermionic gear - you have power switching with things like thyrotrons, obviously radios, and there were computers made that way, such as the Harwell Witch in 1952.
Maybe you don't get 4K AI video generation or petabyte-scale advertising analytics but you could have quite a lot.
For reference, the original 4004 Intel CPU from 1971 ran at 740 kHz, so 52 kHz isn't even enough computing to do a secure TLS web connection without an excessively long wait. The 4004 did not do floating point, however, and it wouldn't be until between the 486 (1989) and the Pentium (1993) that we see 5-10 MFLOPS of performance.
Hmm... I think 9800X should be able to do at least 32 FLOPS per cycle per core. So 1.3 TFLOPS is the ceiling for the CPU. 1/100000 leaves you... 12 MFLOPS.
Then there's the iGPU for even more FLOPS.
Many things we now take for granted would indeed be impossible. I suppose the good news is that in some electropunk timeline where everyone had to use tubes, your TLS connection might not be practical, but the NSA datacentre would be even less practical. On the other hand, there'd be huge pressure on efficiency in code and hardware use. Just before transistorisation, amazing things were done with tubes or electromechanically, and if that had been at the forefront of research for the last 70 years, who knows what the state of the at would look like. Strowger switches would look like Duplo.
Probably there would still be a lot of physical paperwork, though!
Comparisons to old technology is just something I do for fun, don't read too much into it. :)
Fun fact: A usb-C to HDMI dongle for has more computing power than the computer that took us to the moon.
As far as the NSA being even less practical, they're among the few who have the staff that could eke every last cycle of performance out of what remained. Maybe the Utah datacenter wouldn't work, but Room 641A long predates that.