Pretty good Solarpunk prompt with some medium-hard sci-fi thrown in.

  • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    You can make vacuum tubes all day. You can even make transistors and integrated circuits at home.

    But the definition of “computer” here is a glorified calculator.

    A TI-81, the graphing calculator from the 1980’s, used a chip that had 8500 transistors. So if you’re planning to, say, build a dam and need to know how thick the cement should be to account for the pressure from the volume of water when the lake is full - unless you want to do all that engineering calculus yourself (I promise, it sucks) then you might want some more advanced computational power. Sure, dams were built when this was all done by hand. Dams also collapsed and washed towns away sometimes. Something I haven’t heard of happening in a while.

    As nice as it is to think about going back to an analog world, things like knowing what the climate is doing, medical advancements, sharing video and images, etc. save lives and advance medicine. No one is making a COVID vaccine without sequencing the genome of a virus. Pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, cars with increased fuel efficiency, electric vehicles, solar panels - all perfectly good reasons to enjoy modern microprocessors.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      You’re moving the goal post. You went from being able to manufacture CPUs in general to manufacturing modern CPUs that can replace current workloads.

      Sure, we’d have to decrease reliance on them for a while, but we be able to manufacture some computers without really any delay, while we build back to modern capabilities.

      • eleitl@lemmy.zip
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        2 days ago

        To be fair, we can live fine without streaming video and bloated crapware. 1990s hardware is more than sufficient to keep essentials alive.

      • GreenShimada@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I was thinking of modern CPUs the whole time and then people are trying to “What-if” their way into whatever they want it to be.

        Fine, it’s whatever you want it to be. We’ll be making modern CPUs in a bucket next to the bucket where we recycle paper.