[ale] OT: Woah, retro!

Pete Hardie pete.hardie at sciatl.com
Wed Feb 19 08:41:15 EST 2003


Joe wrote:
> "James P. Kinney III" <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>I could probably put my hands on a PDP-10 if I really wanted to play
>>with antiques.
>>
>>In the event of planet-wide disaster (asteroid impact) does the
>>knowledge still exist to recreate the computer revolution or would it
>>really be back to the dark ages? Could we actually hand code a
>>rudimentary compiler than feed it the parts to build a better one until
>>we recover back to this point (minus M$, of course :)
> 
> 
> An absolutely minimal Forth interpreter, in 8086 machine code, is
> under ten instructions long. Forth is just barely high-level enough to
> do useful work in, IMO, but it'd be a great bootstrap language. (I've
> never managed to do any useful work in Forth, but I can appreciate the
> possibility.) But I think we'd be OK software-wise. I'd be worried if
> there were no working hardware, though. I'm not quite sure about the
> exact effects of EMP - it screws up magnetic domains, right?  Which
> probably means that boot ROMs, for example, would be history, and we'd
> have to get things rolling from the bare metal. But would EMP hose
> stuff other than persistent memory?  Would the CPUs be OK? Or would we
> end up looking for the long-lost plans for Babbage's Analytical
> Engine?

IMNSHO, the biggest problem would be manufacturing.  I'm certain enough know-how 
  would exist to rebuild computers from transistors, and the language wars would 
not be a problem, but it would be awfully hard to get those chip fabs from scratch

-- 
Pete Hardie                   |   Goalie, DVSG Dart Team
     posting from, but not     |
	speaking for:             |
Scientific Atlanta, Digital Video Services Group



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