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Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

It seems Like projects like this (that include basic productivity tools) could potentially enable a small resurgence in sovereign computing. A 5 dollar esp32 is powerfulll enough to emulate 8086 architecture while running a tcp/ip stack, DVP display, and usb input peripherals.

With a simple OS like CP/M or others, a low cost computer you can actually trust to only run trusted code is possible again.

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My take is that "sovereign computing" will go from something 0.001% of the population cares about to over 1% in the coming three decades, i.e. three orders of magnitude. It will depend on how long we continue in the current survtech course. There is also the question of if we will see mandatory backdoors in hardware. For example, Country X could legislate that all CPUs sold in their territory need to have a latent command-and-control area for law enforcement to use. If that happens, I'll start converting my savings into a physical stash of old reliable CPUs.

In any case, it seems that CPUs have a very long shelf life; it's still possible to buy 8086 processors[^1].

[^1]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rochester-electro...

Default esp32 still comes with built-in binary blobs for the radio though iirc

Yeah, probably better with the esp as just a modem over UART, with the OS on something like a baochip or even just a wCH32. https://www.baochip.com/

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