[palmotea]

In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications."

Crude automated [solar powered] farm machines - would probably be useless. Animal power is probably the way to go. Or steam. Go to a threshing bee sometime: I've seen a tractor that runs on wood.

Solar powered ebook readers to store those farming manuals and other guides - the life span of batteries would be short, get that shit on paper fast.

Solar powered computers for spreadsheets and planning software - plan in your head or use a paper spreadsheet.

Computers might be everywhere today, and you personally might not know how to do anything without a computer, but practically no one had a computer 40-45 years ago, and literally no one had a computer when society was last at a "collapse" level of technology. COMPUTERS ARE NOT NECESSARY.

[nostrademons]

Just because computers weren't around 40-50 years ago doesn't mean that computers won't be very handy to have around in a post-collapse world. Technology is very much path-dependent: the future does not look like the past, and incorporates everything that has happened up to that point. The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire. It continued to use Roman coinage, for example, the Latin language, Roman roads, Roman provincial government, and so on.

The point of having computers is simply that they perform certain tasks orders of magnitude faster than humans. They're a tool, no more and no less. Before computers, a "calculator" was a person with paper and a slide rule, and you needed hundreds of them to do something like compute artillery trajectories, army logistics, machine tool curves, explosive lensing, sending rockets into space, etc. Managing to keep just one solar-powered calculator working for 10 years after a collapse frees up all those people to do things like farming. Keeping a solar-powered electric tractor working frees up all those farmers, and frees up the animals for eating.

IMHO this project is at least operating under the right principles, i.e. make the software work on scavenged parts, control your dependencies, be efficient with your computations, focus on things you can't do with humans.

[kibwen]

> The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire.

Our modern institutions and infrastructure depend on impossibly-complex, precariously-fragile world-spanning supply chains that rely on untold quantities of highly-skilled labor whose own training and employment is dependent upon having enough pre-existing material prosperity that 90% of the population is exempt from needing to grow their own food.

Meanwhile, the supply chain for the pre-Roman and post-Roman worlds were not very different. They were producing tin in Britain in 2000 BC, and they were producing tin in Britain in 1000 AD. Crucially, the top of the production pyramid (finished goods) was still close to the bottom of it (raw materials harvestable with minimal material dependencies) without a hundred zillion intervening layers of middlemen.

[achierius]

> Meanwhile, the supply chain for the pre-Roman and post-Roman worlds were not very different.

This isn't true! We know of huge differences between who was producing what goods and where between Roman and post-Roman Britain. To give one example: ceramic production came to a complete halt, and people essentially had to make do with whatever pre-exiting ceramics they had had beforehand. Sure, an agricultural worker living on their own land off in the countryside might not have noticed a huge difference -- but someone who had been living by a legionary fortress, or one of the primary imperial administrative centers, or in one of the burgeoning villas, certainly would have had to make significant changes across the period.

[kibwen]

Yes, I'm guilty of painting with an overbroad brush here in an attempt to emphasize the difference in scale between then and now. It's not the case that the collapse of Roman authority had no effect on the people of the former territories; it certainly led to an indisputable loss of living conditions across the board, including in industrial output. But my point is that, in the event of a modern collapse, we aren't going to revert to some "checkpoint" of irreversible technological progress; we could just as likely revert to the living conditions of a denizen of the remnants of the Eastern empire as of 600 AD (and that might be an optimistic outcome!). Technological progress is not a one-way street, is my meaning, and from our lofty perch, we are entirely capable of crashing hard to Earth.

[nostrademons]

And yet a consumer durable is a consumer durable regardless of whether the manufacturer stays in business, at least before the modern practice of giving everything an Internet connection and making it phone home to keep working (which CollapseOS explicitly avoids). The Mac LC that I got in 1991 would still boot up in 2012. The CD-ROMs that I burned in the late 90s, I was able to transfer to external hard disk in 2021. My solar panels and PowerWall continue to work when the power and Internet goes down.

Post-collapse society will look very different from modern Information-age society, and will definitely have a lot more people growing their own food. Knowing how to identify plants, and the care instructions (sun/soil/water/space requirements) for each variety you're growing, and how other people have handled problems like pests and rot, can save you several years of failed harvests. Several years of failed harvests is likely the difference between surviving and not surviving.

[kibwen]

I'm not intending to denigrate CollapseOS; they appear to be deliberately taking precautions for a specific degree of technological catastrophe, and it seems worthwhile for someone to prepare for that, regardless of how likely one thinks it may be.

[palmotea]

> Just because computers weren't around 40-50 years ago doesn't mean that computers won't be very handy to have around in a post-collapse world.

They won't be handy to you or me, because we'd need to put our efforts into securing basic needs. You won't have the luxury to spend your time scavenging parts to build an 8-bit computer to do anything, then spending a bunch more time programming it. Even if you did, how would give you and advantage in acquiring food, shelter, or fuel over much simpler solutions using more basic technologies like paper?

Computers are the kind of thing people with a lot of surplus food spend their time with.

> The point of having computers is simply that they perform certain tasks orders of magnitude faster than humans. They're a tool, no more and no less. Before computers, a "calculator" was a person with paper and a slide rule, and you needed hundreds of them to do something like compute artillery trajectories, army logistics, machine tool curves, explosive lensing, sending rockets into space, etc.

Computers are useful for those tasks, but those are tasks only giant organizations like governments need to do. That's not you in a post-collapse world.

> Managing to keep just one solar-powered calculator working for 10 years after a collapse frees up all those people to do things like farming.

I think you have that backwards. No one's going to skip needed farming work and starve so they can go compute artillery trajectories. If they need to farm, they'll go without the artillery computations.

> Keeping a solar-powered electric tractor working frees up all those farmers, and frees up the animals for eating.

I address that up-thread, but solar-powered electric tractors are a fantasy. Even if such a thing existed, it would wear out, break down, and become irreparable long before technological civilization could be rebooted, so you might as well assume it doesn't exist in your planning.

Also, I don't think you're thinking things through: an animal can both be used to do work and (later) be eaten. If you're very poor, which you would be after some kind of civilization collapse, you don't eat animals very often.

[nostrademons]

Having a government in a box when everyone around you is scrounging for food makes you king, particularly if you also managed to save a couple militarized drones through the collapse. That's a pretty enviable position to be in.

The point, as with every capital investment, is to make more efficient the labor of the people who are securing those basic needs, so that you can free them up for work progressively higher on the value chain.

During the collapse itself, the way to do this is pretty easy: you kill the people who have food, shelter, or fuel but are not aligned with you, and give it to people who are aligned with you. And then once you have gotten everyone aligned with you, you increase the efficiency of the people who are doing the work. Saving even just one working tractor can cut the labor requirements from farming enough to support a village from several hundred people to one or two people. You will not have petrol in a post-collapse world, so better hope it's an electric tractor, or drop a scavenged electric motor + EV battery into an existing tractor. Use scavenged solar panels for power, there's plenty of that where I am.

All this requires that you know how things work, so you can trace out what to connect to what and repurpose electronic controls and open up the innards of the stuff you find abandoned on the street, and that's where having a computer and a lot of downloaded datasheets and physical/electronic/mechanical/chemical principles available will help.

[palmotea]

> Having a government in a box when everyone around you is scrounging for food makes you king, particularly if you also managed to save a couple militarized drones through the collapse. That's a pretty enviable position to be in.

Come the fuck on. A fucking 8-bit computer (even a fucking 64-bit computer) is not a fucking "government in a box." And where the fuck are you going to get your "couple militarized drones"? Assuming they're not suicide drones (where "a couple" is not much), how long will they last? How useless would they be without spare parts, maintenance, and ammunition?

We live in the fucking real world, not some videogame where you can find a goddamn robot in a cave still functioning after 500 years and lethal enough for a boss-battle.

> You will not have petrol in a post-collapse world, so better hope it's an electric tractor, or drop a scavenged electric motor + EV battery into an existing tractor. Use scavenged solar panels for power, there's plenty of that where I am.

Look: if they don't have petrol, they won't have battery factories either. Batteries wear out. Your fantasy electric tractor will be just as useless a petrol one in short order.

[jazzyjackson]

There is middle ground between individuals and governments… I may not need automatic accounting and inventory via spreadsheets at a small scale, but being able to model the next 3 days of weather based on local conditions without any expectation of online communications could come in pretty handy

[palmotea]

> I may not need automatic accounting and inventory via spreadsheets at a small scale, but being able to model the next 3 days of weather based on local conditions without any expectation of online communications could come in pretty handy

Alright. You have a computer in your possession that is vastly more powerful than an 8-bit machine built from scavenged parts.

1. Do you actually "model the next 3 days of weather based on local conditions without any expectation of online communications" with it?

2. If not, do you know how to built the required sensor suite and write the software to do that?

I feel like you're misunderstanding computers as magic boxes that can do some useful thing with little effort. But this is supposed to be a form of software engineers, building a weather forecasting system would be hard to do even with full access to a university library, Digikey, and the money to work on it full time. But we're talking about doing it with scavenged components while you're hungry looking for food.

[vel0city]

Weather forecasts get to be useful when you have samples from a wide range of locations. A few weather stations on maybe a few acres of land wouldn't really get you decent weather predictions. You wouldn't know about some disturbance in the upper atmosphere leading to the jet stream pushing that cold winter blast further South than typical leading to the freeze that destroys your crops. You wouldn't know about that hurricane growing off the shore.

[vdupras]

I 100% agree that computers are not necessary. But regardless of that, the ability to program microcontrollers is still a superpower and if you can have it, you have a hell of an edge.

[palmotea]

> But regardless of that, the ability to program microcontrollers is still a superpower and if you can have it, you have a hell of an edge.

I really disagree with that. It will give practically no edge. It's a specialist skill that's only really useful in the context of an already computerized society for mass production or big one-offs.

If you have a collapse, I think the assumption is there would little to no mass production of advanced goods (hence, the scavenging concept). Then you're left with big one-offs, which are things large organizations like governments build and not all the time.

[hereonout2]

I dunno, microcontrollers could help in this zombie apocalypse world we're imagining.

I would think even in small scale having things like a 3d printers, CNC machines, networked video surveillance and alarm systems, solar arrays etc would be very beneficial.

Absolutely though the top priorities would be much simpler things though like food, clean water and shelter.

[hakfoo]

Process control seems like the big one. Precise tools for precise measurements and monitoring are pretty high up the tech tree, so if you can say "we saved a box of Arduinos and sensors from the Before Times", you can get those capabilities back sooner, and potentially use them as references for tools built with more renewable resources.

[kjs3]

In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications."

Considering how much potentially invaluable info is only/mostly/only easily available as a PDF, I'm thinking a working ereader would be of nontrivial value.

Now...if there was only a way to crunch a PDF on an 8-bit processor I recovered from my washing machine...

[anthk]

- pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD

- wv/odt2txt and friends

- cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot

- A Forth with Starting Forth it's hugely valuable, ditto with a Math Book like the Calculus from Spivak.

Not a collapse, but a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, they need to be constantly updated. If you can salvage some older machine with DuskOS+networking, simple gopher and IRC clients/servers will work with really low bandwidth (2/3 KBPS and less).

[kjs3]

- pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD

Based on xpdf. Probably not 8-bit capable.

- pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD

From OpenOffice. Probably not 8-bit capable.

Point to a PDF to something useful converter that runs in 64K bytes and can handle the 'PDF as a wrapper around some non-text image of the document' and we can talk. Seriously...I'd be fascinated.

- cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot

Not sure how that helps. And can you port gnuplot to run in 8-bit/64k?

* a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, *

Ridiculous, unless your definition of 'usable' is 'unless I can get to TwitFaceTubeIn and watch cat videos ima gonna die!'. If civilization collapses and the network goes away tomorrow, my Debian 12, FreeBSD 14 and NetBSD 10 machines will work exactly as well as it does today until I can't power it and/or the hardware dies (sans email and web, of course). Yeah, the windows 10/11 things will bitch and moan constantly, and I assume MacOS too, but even with degraded functionality, it's far from 'unusable'. And I'll be able to load Linux or BSD on them so no worries.

they need to be constantly updated

No, they don't. Updates come in 2 broad categories: security fixes and feature release. Post-collapse and no network makes security much less urgent, and no new features is the new normal...get used to it. I have gear that runs HP/UX 10 (last support in 2003); still runs fine and delivering significant value.

And that ignores DOS, Win3, XP and such, which are still (disturbingly) common.

will work with really low bandwidth

You mean....with a network?

[anthk]

I meant, well, not 8 bit capable, but you can send the generated text files to them.

On 'gnuplot' for cp/m... doing a simple chart from X and Y values in TSV paired in two colums can be done either from forth or pascal or whatever you have to read two arrays.

I'm not stating a solution to read future PDF files. Forget the future ones; what I mean it's to 'convert' the ones we currently have.

I'm at a Spanish pubnix/tilde, a public unix server. Here I have a script which converts -with the help of a Cron job and sfeed-, RSS feeds into plain text to be readable over gopher. These can be read even from the crustiest DOS machines in Latin America and Windows 95/98/XP machines. I even pointed a working Retrozilla release, and it's spreading out quickly.

They are at least able to read news too with a gopher/gemini client and News Waffle, with a client written in TCL/TK saving tons of bandwidth. The port with IronTCL will work in the spot on XP machines. Download, decompress, run 'launch.bat' (lanzar.bar in Spanish). The ZIP file weights 15MB. No SSE2 it's required. Neither tons of RAM.

Compare that to a Chrome install. And Chrome requeriments.

The 2nd/3rd world might not be under an apocalipse, but they don't have the reliability of the first world. And lots of folks adored the News Waffle service saving a 95% of the bandwidth.

Instead of the apocalipse, think about 3rd world guys or the rural America. Somethink like https://lite.cnn.com and https://neuters.de will work even under natural disasters with really reduced bandwidth data. Or https://telae.net for Google Maps searchs.

gopher://magical.fish has news feeds, an English to French/Spanish and so on translator , good links to blogs, games and even TPB search. These can be run on any machine, or Lagrange under Android. And, yes, it might work better under a potential earthquake/flood than the web.

[kjs3]

I was opining about reading or converting PDFs on an 8-bit processor. And you're...I dunno what this is but it's certainly not a response to anything I said.