
Rebuilding Civilization from Scratch? - perfmode
A long time ago, I came across a set of resources intended for use in the event of collapse of civilization. It consisted of farming, engineering, blacksmithing, construction technique, etc.<p>Is there such a guide for the bootstrapping of computation from first principles?
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greenyoda
To have computers that are anything close to what you'd recognize as a
computer today, you'd need to have an electronics industry that's capable of
manufacturing semiconductors, disk drives, CRTs, etc. These rely on many
different raw materials which take complex industrial processes to produce.
You will probably have to rebuild most of modern civilization (power plants,
mines, factories, vehicles, roads, etc.) before you can even think of building
computers.

Yes, you could build computers out of relays or vacuum tubes, but their
computational power would be very limited. You're not going to be able to run
Unix on hardware like that. That technology was very slow and had to be
repaired frequently (if you have thousands of vacuum tubes, one would burn out
every few hours).

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sgillen
This is an interesting question. As another poster said, to do this we would
probably have to rebuild most of modern civilization. Leaving instructions to
do that seem almost impossible.

I honestly think though that leaving behind a detailed record of what is
possible and how things used to be would be very valuable in this situation
though. Just letting people know computers did exist and did require
electricity and what electricity was and that we used to burn something called
coal to make it would for sure speed up a future civilizations research
dramatically.

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tannerbrockwell
I'm interested in what anyone else finds. These are projects i'm aware of that
are periphery to your request and valuable in their own right.

[https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/](https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/)
[http://digitarworld.uw.hu/ttlcpu.html](http://digitarworld.uw.hu/ttlcpu.html)
[https://monster6502.com/](https://monster6502.com/)

