| > 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. |
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.