Dusk OS

They can make their own ingots and ultra pure chemicals, and turbopumps and ion implantation machines and spin coaters CVD machines and and the HEPA filters for the cleanroom, and the remote servers that control the licensing dongle for the robot arm that movies the thingie from "A" to "B"?

Sand to "hello world" is a tall order. There is a pyramid of industry that supports the entire thing. Even Sand -> 99.9999 % Si (purification & Czochralski crystal growth) needs multi‑story furnaces, vacuum pulling stations, 10 MW of steady power, and months of process engineering. All of have huge dependency chains.

Even modern "mild" events like supply chain disruptions would be enough to shut down any sort of non-toy level production in short order.

So yeah, a university as it currently stands can make a microchip, relying on all of these dependency chains being in operational order. But I don't doubt that would quickly no longer be the case if you had a hot war or societal collapse.

The exponential growth in processor capabilities relied on a global manufacturing infrastructure from the 1970s until today. To do the same level of progression would require much of that infrastructure.

Assuming someone managed to strategically nuke every major foundry / chemical / machine supplier, but leave everything else the same? Sure, maybe we get back to our present tech in 15-20 years.

Assume it's the result of a societal collapse? No way in hell.

> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

Wow... there are probably several ways we could lose the ability to fab semiconductors. We can look back through history at other periods where they "forgot" how to do various things. Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They lost the knowledge of dome building. Should they have considered doing themselves in because they found themselves in the Dark Ages? We might forget how to do various very involved technical things like fab'ing chips, or we might lose the knowledge/and or ability to even build a fab, for example (just consider the supply-chain required to build a fab and consider how fragile some of those chains are). Yeah, it will mean that something really bad has likely happened, but that doesn't mean that it's the end and we should just go and kill ourselves. It will mean that there's been some kind of discontinuity, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of humanity. People will still be able to grow crops, hunt, fish, etc (given a reasonable climate remains in enough places). Likely the population under these conditions will be much smaller but it doesn't mean that we can never recover as a species - sure, it might take 1000 years. That's ok, we go on just like ancestors before us who endured great hardship.

Most catastrophic scenarios I can imagine result in loss of advanced silicon production, but not necessarily all silicon production. More likely than not there would be ways to keep fabs for old well-trodden processes running. In that situation, there’d probably be a temporary shock of no computers followed by new computers being a lot less powerful… it’d be less “no more computers” and more “new computers are comparable to their Pentium 4/PowerPC G5 era counterparts”, in which case operating systems would still be graphical, just a lot more lightweight. Linux and BSDs would probably quickly take over desktop computing due to being able to run reasonably on such systems with minimal legwork.

If we can’t manufacture chips at all, yeah, things will be in enough of a pickle that computers will be the least of our worries.

> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event and rather than dicking around with computers one should really be considering suicide to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

Hmmm... At a very high altitude extinction-level events have sufficiently sharp edges. But, as we get closer to things it becomes fuzzy. For examples: The Black Death (1347-1351), The Spanish Flu (1918-1919), The Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852), each one of these events were extinction-level events for those in the middle of them. What year would you have selected to self terminate? Remember you would not have hindsight or knowledge that the events are temporary.

To your point - we do have some chokepoints in supply chains here and there but I often wonder how much of that is due to the learning curve. As in, things are centralized because just how we as a civilization learned to build things in our particular historical context - if the context changes and the knowledge and resources are there to rebuild in a different way, we can.

Relatedly - a lot of things seem intrinsically capital intensive, but how much of that is due to the fact that we had large pools of capital when we learned to do those things?

> Any event or series of events that removes mankind's ability to produce modern computers is a global extinction-level event

Semiconductors have been around for, what, 70 years? The idea that humans couldn’t survive without modern tech is ludicrous.

Sure, there will be fewer humans, but extincting humans completely is likely to be incredibly difficult without an atmosphere-on-fire scale event.

Yeah we’re not likely to ever face such a situation and still even need that many computers. It’s an interesting project though in the sense that someone has a 32 bit OS running on every ISA out there (or even aims to).

Interesting but not practical. CPUs are either 64 bit and have memory management hardware or 32 bit and don’t. This dictates whether you have lots of addressable RAM or not, and changes what an OS is for that CPU

> to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

Well aren't you a bundle of joy, recommending death to people in bad situations.

A life of misery isn't all that bad. Much worse could happen.

This reminds me of A Man For All Seasons:

Thomas More: "At the worst we could be beggars and still be keep company and be merry together."

Lady Alice: "Aha, merry."

Thomas More: "Aye, merry!"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEa6XRZa9Vg&t=5459s

Or why an "almost C compiler" is better than a C compiler.

That's assuming you can find the proprietary software that is needed. In some cases you're better off just cutting the proprietary bits out entirely and hooking straight into the motor controllers... or whatever else is more immediately upstream of the "business end" of the thing you're hacking.

While it is most likely a very fanciful pet project borne out of post-apo fantasy doomporn, there is one fatal fly in the ointment: In a post apocalyptic situation, who will have THE TIME (nevermind the resources) to dedicate to "operating" one such OS? Apocalypse is generally synonymous with population collapse. Many less humans to interact with means a greatly diminished division of labour and rebuilding civilisation will require first and foremost food production, 14 hours of daily work in the fields, scavenging, hunting, etc....

Taking one worker away from these (tedious) activities would likely be considered an investment that requires significant returns, results, be it only to justify this to other workers who would also like to be sat in front of a computer. Hard to justify having swapped a hard days work for some code on a computer screen.

For that kind of scenario, a lightweight Android rom with some ham-radio driver would probably be more appropriate.

Depends on the level of collapse, and say you get infrastructure up and running (temporarily, mind you, without manufacturing..) - what then? That's what this is for. Cobbling together the pieces left over.

But if you an need an OS for which no viruses or exploits have been develop yet, you may be in luck!

You don't need a CD drive to boot an OS. A humble USB stick does the trick. And nearly every computer made in the last 10 years has a USB port and the ability to boot from it

I think the idea would be to prepare beforehand and have your own copy, alongside your own Wikipedia dump.

only Vi, the resource collapse resistant branch /j