Collapse OS
206 comments
·March 26, 2025perrygeo
wibbily
Same author has a sort of "missing link" version that is better suited to modern PCs. Doesn't answer your philosophical questions about civilizations etc. but the goal isn't to start building Z80s out of transistors anytime soon.
I think the vision here is more likely to play out, if any were to. Not many fabs that can make modern chips, and the biggest one is under the business end of Chinese artillery so. Gotta make do with whatever we have even if new supply dries up.
anthk
Its's the same author.
Uh, wait, I've properly read your comment now.
Still, I miss a ZMachine interpreter for DuskOS. And networking. Gopher, IRC and email (among maybe some NNTP client) are a must.
toss1
Plausible, but there really may not be a middle part longer than a few hours or days, depending on the mechanism (and I'm not even considering nuclear war here). I recall reading a first-hand account of surviving in Sarajevo during the war, and one of the things that most struck the author was how quickly -a mere couple of days- everything changed from going about the day as normal to apocalyptic survival-mode hellscape. And not because of specific battle events, but the breakdown of supply chains.
We really have no way to predict it. It is even likely to be different in different locales.
abrookewood
He kinda deals with that - he has also built another OS called DuskOS, which is when we still have modern computers lying around, but can't make more of them. It's the OS you would use prior to devolving all the way to CollapseOS
wat10000
I don’t think it’s the focus of this, but we do now live in a time where the collapse could potentially happen in an hour.
perrygeo
Or worse, decades in the future when historians look back, they might determine that collapse started before 2025 (perhaps 9/11, 2008 financial collapse, covid, the re-emergence of populist fascism, AI, microplastics, climate change ... take your pick).
Which means we might be living in collapse now, we just don't know it yet. "The Long Emergency" as James Howard Kunstler put it.
gblargg
Like falling into a black hole; you don't notice as it happens, only looking back with more context.
alfiedotwtf
Empires that collapsed not by military conquest didn’t know that they had collapsed until years later.
panarky
Hasn't Kunstler been predicting the imminent end of oil supplies since the 1990s?
When a professional prognosticator's prognostications continue to be falsified by actual events, year after endless year, at some point don't people stop listening to them?
UltraSane
The creation of Fox News
danpalmer
Why do you think that?
I'm assuming you're talking about the internet, networked services, etc, because that's the only conceivable way a collapse could happen that quickly... except all modern infrastructure we rely on like that has backups and redundancy built in, and largely separated failure domains, so that such a failure would never be able to happen that quickly.
lukev
I assume they mean nuclear war.
borntoolate
Even if the collapse is a fuzzy decades one I think it would also have an ever increasing probability of the remainder in under an hour as something entirely forgotten fails.
rossdavidh
That is DuskOS, from the same creator apparently.
anon6362
The frog will boil slowly and discontinuously. The net effects are that by 2030:
- Industrial food will gradually become extremely expensive and homesteading will become more popular. Crop failures and famines will be routine as food security and international trade wanes.
- Unemployment will soar with automation and overall decreased purchasing power.
- Crime and theft will soar as police decline (Austin TX is already understaffed by 300 officers and doesn't respond to property crimes until 48 hours later)
- Civil/national/world wars.
- 100M's of climate refugees migrating across and between continents. If you think scapegoating of "illegal" immigrants is bad now, just wait until all forms of hate in the forms of racism, xenophobia, and classism become turbocharged. Expect militarized borders guarded by killer robots.
nukem222
[dead]
cowfarts
[dead]
boricj
In the past couple of years I've worked on a Ghidra extension that can export any subset of a program as a relocatable object file. I built that because I tried to reverse-engineer/decompile a video game and had unconventional opinions on how to proceed about it.
I didn't design it for a post-collapse scenario, but one can salvage program parts from binary artifacts and create new programs with it, just like how a mechanic in a Mad Max world can scavenge car parts from a scrapyard and create new contraptions. It deconstructs the classical compile-assemble-link workflow in a manner that tends to cause migraines to sane persons.
I've even managed to slightly bend the rules around ABI and sling binary code across similar-ish platforms (PlayStation to Linux MIPS and Linux x86 to Windows x86), but to really take this to its logical conclusion I'd need a way to glue together incompatible ABIs or even ISAs, in order to create program chimeras from just about any random set of binaries.
gblargg
I did this once years ago (on Mac OS classic). I had an mp3 player I liked for its low CPU usage, but didn't like the UI. I figured out the entry points for the mp3 decoding routines and turned it basically into a library to call from my own UI.
Virtual machines/emulators are one extreme, recreating the environment it ran in so no human examination of the particular program is necessary. The approach you describe is at the other end, using bits of programs directly in other code to do basically black-box functions that aren't worth figuring out and coding properly.
bitwize
This is a technique used in "living off the land" in infosec circles. An attacker might not have root privileges, but there might be a bit of code in this program that does one thing with escalated privilege, and a bit of code in that program that does another thing with escalated privilege, and if you have enough of these you can stitch together a "gadget", a series of jumps or calls to these bits of privileged code, to get a shell or do what you want.
boricj
This is a bit different. In your case, you're reusing code and data laying around in a running process to do your bidding from within.
Here, I'm actually stealing code and data from one or more executables and turning these back into object files for further use. Think Doctor Frankenstein, but with program parts instead of human parts.
I only operate on dead patients in a manner of speaking, but you could delink stuff from a running process too I suppose. I don't think it would be useful in the context of return-oriented programming, since all the code you can work with is already loaded in memory, there's no need to delink it back to relocatable code first.
Ericson2314
I worked on one of those too: https://github.com/cncNet/petool
boricj
Neat! Looks like the closest equivalent in your tooling would be pe2obj, which repacks a PE executable as a COFF object file.
Unless I'm mistaken, it doesn't seem to do anything in particular w.r.t. relocations, which is the tricky part about delinking. My educated guess it that repacking might be enough for purely self-contained position-independent code and data, but anything that contains an absolute address will lead to dangling references to the original program's address space.
My tooling recovers relocatable section bytes and recreates relocation tables in order to export object files that are actually relocatable, regardless of their contents.
Ericson2314
It's been a long time, but we manually annotated where the relations should be, and other edits, with the patch sections.
fallat
What a neat idea.
We could use emulators to stitch together code from binaries compiled for particular CPUs.
disqard
You've tickled more than one person's brain here :D
Please consider writing up something about this binary mashup toolkit. You have taken an unusual path and shown how far one can go... it's worthy of sharing more widely.
Good luck!
boricj
The only unusual part about my toolkit is the delinker. Since it outputs relocatable object files, you can then make use of them with conventional tooling.
I've mostly used a linker to build new programs with the parts I've exported. Some of my users use objdiff to compare the output of their decompilation efforts against recreated object files. Others use objcopy or homemade tools to further modify the object files (mostly tweaking the symbol table) prior to reuse. One can generate assembly listings with objdump, although Ghidra already gives you that.
Ironically, the hardest part about using my delinker I think (besides figuring out errors when things go wrong) is just realizing and imagining what you can do with it. It's rather counter-intuitive at first because this goes against anything one might learn in CS 101, but once you get it then you can do all kinds of heretical things with it.
To take this to the next level, beyond adding support for more ISAs and object file exporters, I'd need to generate debugging symbols in order to make debugging the pilfered code a less painful experience. There are plenty of ways delinking can go wrong if the Ghidra database is incorrect or incomplete and troubleshooting undefined behavior from outer space can get tedious.
But in the context of a post-collapse scenario, what one would be really after is some kind of linker that can stitch together a working program from just about any random bunch of object files, regardless of ABI and ISA. My experiments on cross-delinking remained rather tame (same ISA, similar ABI) because gluing all that mess by hand gets really complicated really fast.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Fascinating. I like it! Thanks for sharing.
dgellow
Is that extension publicly available?
boricj
You can find it here: https://github.com/boricj/ghidra-delinker-extension
I've demonstrated a bunch of use-cases on my blog, ranging from porting software to pervasive binary patching and pilfering application code into libraries, all done on artifacts without source code available.
I have one user in particular who successfully used it on a huge (7 MiB) program in a span of a couple of weeks, most of them spent fixing bugs on my end. They then proceeded to crank up the insanity to 11 by splitting that link-time optimized artifact into pieces and swapping parts out willy-nilly. That is theoretically impossible because LTO turns the entire program into a single translation unit subject to inter-procedure optimizations, so functions will exhibit nonstandard calling conventions you can't replicate with freshly built source code, but I guess anything's possible when you binary patch __usercall into MSVC.
I should get back to it once work is less hectic. Delinking is an exquisitely intricate puzzle to solve algorithmically and I've managed to make that esoteric but powerful reverse-engineering technique not only scalable to megabytes worth of code, but also within reach of everyday reverse-engineers.
dgellow
That’s insanely impressive. Your blog is a gold mine, thank you for sharing
PerryStyle
Wow this one of the most interesting things I’ve come across. Definitely could learn a lot by tinkering with this.
Thanks!
palmotea
If "our global supply chain [will] collapse before we reach 2030," why is having a some type of computer a priority?
I feel these kinds of projects may be fun, but they're essentially just LARPing. Though this one seems to have a more reasonable concept than most (e.g. "My raspbery pi-based "cyberdeck" with offline wikipedia will help!" No, you need a fucking farming manual on paper.).
0hijinks
Beyond LARPing the feasibility of building new computers post societal collapse, the website's proposal for collapse being so imminent is... weakly justified?
I'm not an optimist in today's societal climate, but the rationale [1] stems from peak oil and cultural bankruptcy. Peak oil is (was?) the concern of limited oil production in the face of static or increasing demand. The 2019 peak from big oil wasn't about declining production, but declining demand [2]. Which is good, if the ideal is long-lasting migration to renewables.
I won't try to predict the future w/r/t what current societal trends mean for the long-term success of global supply chains, but I would be greatly surprised if cultural bankruptcy alone causes the complete collapse of society in the next 5-10 years.
[1] http://collapseos.org/civ.html
[2] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
er4hn
I think full scale collapse is unlikely. I'd rate balkanization / large scale internet disruptions as pretty likely to happen within the next few years due to a combination of:
- lightly protected and globally reachable attack surface
- increasing geopolitical tensions
- the bizarre tendency to put everything possible online, i.e. IoT devices that always need internet, resources that rely on CDNs to function, other weird dependencies.
tengwar2
You're thinking of a PC. This project doesn't address that type of computer at all. 8-bit computers programmed in Forth suggests very strongly that this is aimed at control engineering, and area where having a few computers makes a big difference to what you can do in an industrial process. It might also be useful for simple radio communication.
kjs3
In addition to a controller, being able to do non-trivial calculations will always be useful.
redkoala
Solar powered micro-controllers might be the way to go that could hook up to crude automated farm machines. Depending on the life span of batteries, solar powered ebook readers to store those farming manuals and other guides, solar powered computers for spreadsheets and planning software, and solar powered cb ham radios for communications with built in encryption keys.
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.
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.
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...
nfriedly
I read the book "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch", and to some extent that also felt like LARPing, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
It also left me wanting more. It has pretty extensive references at the end, I wonder if anyone's put together a collection of all the referenced materials?
saturn8601
Did you read the entire post?
>Some people doubt that computers will stay relevant after a civilizational collapse. I mostly agree. The drastic simplification of our society will mean that we have a lot less information to manage. We'll be a lot more busy with more pressing activities than processing data.
>However, the goal of Collapse OS is not to save computing, but electronics. Managing electricity will stay immensely useful.
I think thats a notable goal. We will conduct business with pen and paper but given that even in a collapse scenario there will be lots of remnants of the current era lying around might as well try and make use of it. Its one of the reason I really don't like the people collecting e-waste in bulk and then melting down the chips for tiny scraps of gold. So much effort went into making those chips there has got to be a better way to preserve these things for usage later.
ewzimm
Civilization doesn't even have to collapse for a project like this to be useful. Like you said, there's lots of e-waste. If you happened to live in a place that ended up with a lot of this stuff but didn't have a lot of infrastructure, you could possibly build up some convenient services with something like this. I like the idea of building software to make hardware less reliant on external resources in general. Over time, it could be useful to have more resilient electronics, because we seem to be designing machines to be more reliant on specific networked infrastructure every year.
nradov
What services? For most modern services the big cost inputs are things like human labor, utilities, and real estate. Reusing obsolete hardware doesn't gain anything. It's likely to be a net negative if it takes up more space, uses more electricity, and requires more maintenance.
goda90
A pressing need for processing data post-collapse is weather forecasting. Knowing the upcoming weather can help avoid crop failures from planting at the wrong time. Of course the data aggregation would also be very challenging as you need data from remote sites for good forecasting.
walleeee
It might also be nice to know where (and when) groundwater is safe to drink
our descendents will perhaps not be thrilled to learn about the "time bombs" we have left them, steadily inching into aquifers or up into surface water. that is of course if they are not too distracted locating water of even dubious potability to care
palmotea
They did weather forecasting before computers (that was literally my grandpa's job during WWII).
kragen
Even a little data from remote sites can provide a huge advantage for forecasting. Temperature, humidity, and air pressure, roughly three bytes, four times a day: 0.001 bps per weather station. (Precipitation and wind speed and direction are pretty useful, but worse cost-benefit.) And collection of that data is very much less labor-intensive when a microcontroller and radio does it for you.
Other kinds of very-low-bit-rate telecommunications messages that are still extremely valuable:
"Lucretia gravely ill. Hurry."
"I-44 mile 451: bandits."
"Corn $55 at Salem."
"Trump died."
"Springfield captured."
"General Taylor signed ceasefire."
"Livingstone found alive."
The first of these inspired Morse to invent the telegraph; she died before the mail reached him. None of them are over 500 bits even in ASCII, and probably each could be encoded in under 100 bits with some attention to coding, some much less. 100 bits over, say, 2 hours, requires a channel capacity of 0.014 bits per second.
Even without advanced compression algorithms, you could easily imagime the corn message being, say, "<figs>!$05000<ltrs>ZCSXV" in ITA2 "Baudot" code: 14 5-bit characters, 70 bits.
Information theory shows that there's no such thing as being out of communication range; it's just a question of what the bit rate of the channel is. But reducing that to practice requires digital signal processing, which is many orders of magnitude more difficult if you are doing it with pencil and paper. It also benefits greatly from precise timekeeping, which quartz resonator crystals make cheap, reliable, robust, and lightweight.
Encryption is another case where an amount of computation that is small for a microcontroller can be very valuable, even if you have to transmit the encrypted message by carving it into wood with your stone knife.
The Bitcoin blockchain in its current form requires higher bandwidth than a weather station network, but still a tiny amount by current internet standards, about 12kbps originally, I think about 26kbps with segwit. Bitcoin (or an alternative with a longer block time) could potentially provide a way to transmit not just prices but actual payments under adverse circumstances. It does require that participants have enough computing power to sign transactions; I think it should be relatively resilient against imbalances of computation power among participants, as long as no 51% attack becomes feasible through collusion.
palmotea
> Did you read the entire post?
I did. That's why I said it was a "more reasonable concept than most."
trod1234
> why is having some type of computer a priority.
Mechanization and Automation.
It creates time you would normally have to spend actively on labor. Age of energy and all.
The main inputs for this though would be quite difficult to bootstrap. I'm talking about magnet wire enamel and electrical isolation.
You need that to make motors and actuators. You need computers for the control systems.
schiffern
>you need a fucking farming manual on paper.
I never bothered with fancy acid-free paper. Modern paper has good longevity, but to be safe I use non-recycled, non-whitened (91 brightness) paper.
Guide with prong fasteners (I prefer white tape, full-size pages, double/triple`inside a sheet protector as covers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVnpnHWcE04
A different technique with brad fasteners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD3vWZ0I85g
Lots of fancy book-binding tutorials out there, but I suspect most people don't realize how simple a paperback can actually be.
palmotea
> With an adjustable hole punch, prong fasteners, (optionally) duct tape for the spine, and (optionally) sheet protectors for the front and back covers, you can crank out a survival library of (open-source) books as fast as pages come out your Brother laser.
This is actually one of the few "post apocalyptic" computer ideas that actually makes some sense to me. Though it would probably still make more sense to pre-print that library than wait until conditions are difficult to do the printing.
Unless your plan is assume availability of printer paper, you'd still need to store the same volume of blank paper as your library, and you'd be stuck trying to run a printer when things like electricity are much less available.
schiffern
> it would probably still make more sense to pre-print that library than wait until conditions are difficult to do the printing.
Basically it's cliff-notes from my shot at an "MVP of home hardcopy backups." No surprise, these simpler techniques (often seen when corporations had internal printing for employee handbooks and such) are better suited to home processing with minimal equipment. All you need is a three-hole punch.
It's not about achieving a "perfect" bookbinding (a real term), or for people who do bookbinding as a hobby. Instead it's a fast/easy/cheap technique for people who just want a hardcopy backup, without needing a special bookbinding vice in the house.
Three ring binders were my obvious first choice, but they're surprisingly costly, somewhat awkward to use, prone to tearing pages, and usually take more space on the shelf.
Hope that explains it better. Cheers
kylebenzle
I'm still WAY better off with my solar panels and ALL the books on an external hard drive. I can't think of ANY situation where a print out of Wikipedia would be better than a digital version.
schiffern
Wikipedia is an extreme example, since it's highly impractical to print the whole thing. OTOH printing your "Top 20" survival books is quick and affords a nice measure of system-level dissimilar redundancy (not to mention valuable barter goods :D).
echoangle
> I can't think of ANY situation where a print out of Wikipedia would be better than a digital version.
An EMP destroys your electronics and makes accessing the digital version impossible?
palmotea
> I'm still WAY better off with my solar panels and ALL the books on an external hard drive.
No you're not. One component is your setup gets fried and you lose access to everything.
Paper is its own reader device: it's far more resilient, because it has much few dependencies for use. Just think about digital archiving vs paper archiving for a bit, and it becomes clear.
> I can't think of ANY situation where a print out of Wikipedia would be better than a digital version.
Wikipedia would be of little practical value in a post collapse situation. And frankly, it's pretty terrible now for anything besides satisfying idle curiosity.
pjc50
Whenever I read these kinds of collapse posts I wonder: where do the bodies go in this scenario? Because if that kind of collapse happens the management of seven billion corpses becomes pressing.
vdupras
For french speaking people, I recommend "Ravage" by Barjavel. It's not realistic by any means, but it's a nice take on this very issue :)
The serious take: live in the countryside. This is an urban problem.
all2
Depending on the source of their un-aliveness you have a few options:
1. they rot on the face of the ground and the carrion eaters will take care of it
2. they are already cinder/charcoal and the plants will take care of it
kragen
Given a land area of 510 million km², in the worst case, that's a sudden event producing 14 bodies per km², about 25 meters from one body to the next. If I were one of a small number of survivors in that situation, I'd dig a mass grave, dump 14 bodies into it, and enjoy my nice, sanitary square kilometer all by myself. Probably boil the water from the well. Until I die of starvation because I don't know how to hunt, or from an infected wound, or something.
In more plausible cases, we're talking about a population collapse where the deaths are either concentrated in cities, spread out over several years, or both. If they're concentrated in cities, maybe avoid the cities for three to six months until they finish rotting. If they're spread out over several years, those who die later will be able to bury those who die earlier; it only takes a few man-hours of labor to dig a grave.
Jtsummers
Burn the bodies, let scavengers have at them, or put them in a river and let those downstream deal with them. Probably easier to burn or let scavengers have at them than bury them. Fewer calories burned on your part compared to digging.
Regarding hunting, if you're near a river and it isn't piling up with bodies from upstream, you can take up fishing. It's easier to learn from scratch on your own and requires less effort.
ben_w
> 510 million km², in the worst case, that's a sudden event producing 14 bodies per km², about 25 meters from one body to the next.
That's the area of the planet; you only get that distribution if the event also redistributes the bodies evenly over the entire globe, including oceans. (Though I'm not sure how you go from 14/km^2 to 25 meter separation?)
> If they're spread out over several years, those who die later will be able to bury those who die earlier; it only takes a few man-hours of labor to dig a grave.
During the covid pandemic, which was around a single percentage point of the world population over a few years, there were reports in the UK and the USA of mass graves, normal death procedures being overwhelmed.
Global supply chain collapse is kinda the "mass starvation because farms can't get fertiliser to grow enough crops, nor ship them to cities" scenario. If you can't hunt or fish, you're probably one of the corpses (very few people will have the land to grow their own crops, especially without fertiliser).
WesolyKubeczek
I’m most likely going to be one of the corpses, so not my problem.
2mlWQbCK
I am not into this end-of-the-world collapse thing at all, but I like reading about the strong focus on simplicity and support for limited hardware. There is a lot of talk about keeping things simple in software, but very few act on it. I don't need the threat of a global disaster to be interested in running operating systems like that.
Been doing some retro hobby (16-bit, real-mode, 80286) DOS development lately. It is refreshing to look at a system and be able to at least almost understand all the things going on. It might not be the simplest possible system, not the most elegant CPU design, but compared to the bloated monsters we use today it is very nice to work with. DOS is already stretching the limits of what I can keep in my head and reason about without getting completely lost in over-engineered (and leaky) abstraction layers.
jeffchien
Now I want a scavengers' guide to identify machines that might have a compatible microprocessor within them, because I haven't seen a Commodore or Apple II in a long time. Arcades with older cabinets obviously have them, but if most post-apocalyptic media are prophetic, they'll probably be occupied by a gang of young ne'er-do-wells. I suppose, thanks to the College Board, Ti-83s (Z80) are still quite common in the US. Are there toys, medical equipment, or vending machines that still use these chips?
I wonder if ESP32s and Arduinos might be more commonly found, though I could see the argument that places with those newfangled chips may be more likely to become radioactive craters in some scenarios.
nkali
I tried to do something like that in my free time. ARMs are everywhere, PICs are very common as well: https://github.com/ninakali/chip_scavenger/tree/main/src
kragen
Hey, this is fantastic, thanks!
thesuitonym
The Z80 is still an insanely popular microcontroller, that can be found it so, so many devices. Head down to your local Walmart's toy aisle open some of the electronics there (Post-collapse, of course) and you'll certainly find a few.
That's not as easy as just dropping a full computer on your desk, but having a low power processor that's easy to find replacements for would be useful. That is, of course, if you spent the time pre-collapse to learn how to make a useful system out of those components, which I suspect is the real goal of Collapse OS.
kragen
Can you name two such devices? Because the only thing I've ever found a Z80 in is an S1 MP3 player. I've found ARMs, 8051s, and weird Epson microcontrollers they seem to have never published the instruction set for, but never a Z80.
zimpenfish
According to [0], TI were launching new graphic calculators with Z80s as late as 2016 - the TI-84 Plus CE-T Python edition (which is still available on Amazon UK[1][2]!)
Not a hugely compelling argument for "the z80 is still a popular microcontroller", mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Texas_Instrument...
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Texas-Instruments-TI-84-CE-T-Python...
[2] Mild cheating going on though because it runs the Python on an ARM copro.
kjs3
They only stopped making them last year. Someone was buying them, enough to keep the production lines going, and not to run CP/M.
TI uses them in one of their calculator lines. I've seen gobs of them as embedded controllers in invarious industrial systems (I have family in manufacturing). I understand a lot of coin-op games (think pinball or pachinko) use them. I've seen them in appliance controller boards (don't recall the brand).
vdupras
This link might be coming up in the context of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43481590 which went a bit under the HN radar.
EDIT: oh, and in case the website goes over quota, try https://new.collapseos.org/ . I haven't thrown the DNS switch yet, but I expect my meager Fastmail hosting will bust today.
lametti
It's a nice article from Wired in the linked thread.
And from your website:
> What made me turn to the "yup, we're fucked" camp was "Comment tout peut s'effondrer" by Pablo Servigne, Éditions du Seuil, 2015.
That'll make for some light reading next time I head up north. Thanks for the recommendation.
sb057
Appropriately enough, the website is no longer accessible due to rate limiting, and the Internet Archive is down due to a power outage.
alnwlsn
I've been meaning to give this a try for a while - I have several of the "supported" systems and I've designed a couple of my own simple Z80 computers over the past few years. Being able to program AVRs from a scavenged e-waste Z80 system seems strangely compelling to me. There's a LOT of AVRs in e-waste.
But, if you absolutely needed to depend on it, I think that other technology might be better for the kinds of things we normally use microcontrollers for. If I need to control electronics where something that does this for a minute, then waits for that so it can do something else until this other thing, it's hard to imagine that a would-be apocalypse-ee would want to use a microcontroller rather than a more easily improvised mechanical cam timer [0]
kragen
I'm interested to hear what kinds of things you find AVRs in! Are they reflashable?
alnwlsn
Could be just about anything, from thermostats to CPAP machines to SFP fiber transceivers. Anything that needs to be just a little bit smart (but usually not internet connected) can have one. For hobbyists, the ATMega328P was the go-to for about 15 years, before ESP32 and Pi Pico took over more recently. I'm sure Arduino helped a lot with the AVR's proliferation.
There are no one-time programmable versions of AVR as far as I know, so they can all have their internal Flash reprogrammed.
kragen
Awesome, thanks! I know them mostly from hobbyist contexts, and I noted that Atmel kind of stopped updating them after the ATMega328PU (and then failed as a company), so I wondered if they were kind of a failed product line, because there weren't enough hobbyists to sustain the product line. It's nice to hear I was wrong!
tamimio
> Bandwidth Restricted
>The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly.
It seems it collapsed!
trod1234
Well the load balancer is still up, but its just doing a redirect loop now.
I can't imagine a single 302 request getting redirected 10x in a loop to the redirect limit per visitor is good for bandwidth.
vdupras
Sorry about the mess, I didn't anticipate the load. The website has been moved, but DNS propagation must occur. https://new.collapseos.org/ might work if your DNS still points to the old server.
nickpsecurity
Check out BunnyCDN. I got a few, no-frills sites running on it. They're cheap. They also have a paid, permanent cache. It's absorbing both burst and AI crawler traffic for me right now.
barbequeer
this line got me:
> under what conditions do you believe the civilization you're living under will collapse? [...] Oh, you just haven't made that list yet? [...] Or you could take the question from the other side and list the conditions that are necessary for your civilization to continue to exist. That's an interesting list too.
I've always dismissed collapse talk as "batshit crazy" as the author says. but he raises good points here. maybe I'm not batshit crazy enough.
stevenAthompson
It still seems pretty crazy to me.
In the wired article the author says he thinks climate change will disrupt trade routes, but obviously society would route around the damage as long as it remained profitable to do so. The only scenario in which this hypothetical makes sense would be mass causality events like pandemics or wars that prevent travel and trade.
So we're talking about a hypothetical situation in which global trade has halted almost completely for some reason, and has been stopped for a very, very long time. This means that the majority of the worlds population are either dead or dying, which means that YOU will be either dead or dying as well.
Even if we accept the premise (a tall ask) AND we assume you will happen to be one of the survivors because you're "special", wouldn't it make more sense to prep by building a cargo ship so trade can resume sooner than it does to build apocalypse proof micro-controller code?
vdupras
Trade routes as we know them today are made possible by Pax Americana, which is fading as we speak.
anthk
Don't be so Amerigo-centrist. Europe and the Mediterranean Sea have been trading since litteral millenia. Guess why? civilization was born there because the tribes could share knowledge and goods like crazy.
Meanwhile, America didn't even exist for the Romans.
stevenAthompson
I'm not well informed enough to have an opinion at that scale (few are). However, the potential death of Pax Americana implies that trade routes will be different in the future, not that people will inexplicably stop trading with one another completely. In fact, War is often a great stimulator of trade.
kragen
There was a lot of trade in the centuries up to WWII, though.
sunrunner
> mass causality events like pandemics or wars
Luckily neither of those things has happened in the last few years.
hnthrow90348765
It is mostly handwringing about unrealistic scenarios as these types generally assume that all militaries, emergency response groups, every book, factory, and source of expertise completely disappears and it's up to you, the lone hacker on a farm or something to become the source of expertise through a squirrel-cache of carefully curated information. That's very unlikely to happen simultaneously for every single country and if it does it's probably an extinction event.
null
cowfarts
[dead]
aeblyve
Targeting smartphones seems like a highly realistic way to make something like this work. The average westerner has like three of them lying around in desk drawers and they already have a number of useful peripherals attached. It is much less obvious, especially to the layman, how to turn the microcontroller in the coffee machine into something like a useful gate control device.
null
K0balt
It seems like any serious endeavor on this front would focus on arm-m0 , risc-v, and Xtensa ESP cores. Those are the ones that can be recovered by the billions. You can recover tens of 1980s era level computers out of most any consumer device these days, even lightbulbs often have one.
For $0.1 I can buy an MCU that can bit bang a keyboard , mouse, sound, VGA, with 2x the memory and 96 times the processing power as my old 6502 based computer. An esp32 is much, much more capable, like better than an old pentium machine and has wifi, usb, Bluetooth, etc…. And costs 0.7-2$ on a module. They can be found in home automation lightbulbs, among other things.
Espressos has shipped over a billion esp32 chips since the platform launched.
Sure, we should have a 6502 based solution, as it has a lot of software out there and a minimal transistor count, making it possible to hand-build. But for a long time we will be digging up esp32s and they are much more useful.
The problem with claims of imminent societal collapse is they treat "collapse" like an event, with the world neatly divided into before and after. Historically, societal collapse is much more fuzzy. No neat single cause. No single moment when things flipped. You can only truly know the collapse has happened well in retrospect.
In terms of computing, this means that any strategy looking at a before/after collapse framing is missing the entire interesting middle part - how do we transition from this high-tech to low-tech world over the course of decades. I seriously doubt it can happen by anticipating what computing we might need and just leapfrogging there.