Thanks for the link to Sam Falvo's blog.
I've met Sam a couple of times in San Francisco/Bay Area - he's a regular at the Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group, so very much into keeping his systems simple and understandable.
I found the Collapse OS discussion more of a thought provoker - of just how exactly you might reboot a useful amount of computing from limited technology - and without all of the rest of the communications networks available - would it actually be useful at all?
Might it just be a few isolated individuals, resorting back to primitive coding as an alternative to the onset of boredom or insanity?
It reminds me of the TV show - Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars in the US), where two teams compete to construct a machine from scrap, in a scrapyard that just so happens to have some conveniently placed essential items.
In our version, "RetroComputer Challenge" - probably set in some abandoned warehouse conveniently littered with techno-junk, there would be at least one retrievable 1980's home computer based on 6502 or Z80 and a working TV, or serial terminal. Without these planted "gems" it would be almost impossible to achieve anything.
Such a warehouse does exist, "Computer Reset" in Dallas - recently featured on the retrocomputing forum
https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/texas ... las-tx/536If we were to assume that we had no access to anything better than 8-bit cpus with a full 64K of RAM/ROM available, might we arrange them differently to what we do now?
Would they primarily be single user, single application - or would we strive to build multi-processor machines for more speed and then construct basic networks? Would we develop wireline modems, or with hindsight opt for a primitive form of wireless networking?
I guess the question is, that given an arbitrary re-starting point, with the benefit of hindsight, would we proceed along a very much different path, than the one we have followed for the last 40 years?