The computer built to last 50 years (2021)

http://ploum.net/the-computer-built-to-last-50-years/

by ecliptik • 4 years ago

71 88 4 years ago

The Commodore 64 was introduced 40 years ago. I’m not sure 50 years is that long or hard for a computer to do? This article is written like 50 years is undicipherable hieroglyphics territory.

I can still remember LOAD “*”,8,1 like it was yesterday. And original Commodore 64s still run today.

keithnz• 4 years ago

I think there is more problems with the tapes and disks deteriorating, especially if they keep getting used.

abrookewood2• 4 years ago

What about the load times? I remember waiting what felt like hours, hoping that the game I wanted to play was going to load successfully from tape, watching those flashing lines like a hawk - and frequently being disappointed!

eskathos• 4 years ago

Last time i wanted to load a game, i did it from mp3 files on my phone, with a usb-c to minijack and a minijack to magnetic tape interface adapter. worked flawlessly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape_adapter

coldtea5• 4 years ago

This article is written like 50 years is undicipherable hieroglyphics territory.

Then again your name is Rambo, whereas the author might be some 20+ year old, for whom Rambo itself is a "classic" movie kinda like Casablanca was for us :)

JohnJamesRambo2• 4 years ago

Nods in Rambo.

dbtc• 4 years ago

I think that the computers built to last 50 years are not really computers, but other things which contain or use a computer.

Word processor, car, calculator, camera, space telescope...

drewzero13• 4 years ago

I can't speak to the others, but I have very little faith in modern car computers lasting that long. They have become so complex, gaining additional sensors and controls for improved safety and efficiency (great!) and requiring special programming tools at the dealership to update software or install some replacement parts (not so great!). If the company goes under or can no longer support an aging car computer system, a single part failure could limit the functionality of the vehicle. (SAAB TechII, cars with 2G/3G modems, etc.)

On the other hand, if you're talking about older ECUs and related systems before the rise of the connected digital dash, you're probably right. The one in my car is 40 years old, and it seems to be built to last at least 50 if the rest of the car can hold on that long.

boznz2• 4 years ago

And a lot of new cars from this century are specifically designed to not be reverse engineered in some cases to the extent of having encrypted CAN messages or having to pair a failed module with the ECU cryptographically to discourage 3rd party replacements.

nynx• 4 years ago

Right now, I don’t see how a general purpose computer could last 50 years. The article refers to it being modular, but you’d have to replace so many parts… would it still be the same computer?

ecliptik2• 4 years ago

The MNT Reform [1] is an attempt at this. All parts replaceable and upgradable, with full schematics and design docs available when possible.

I can’t find the exact quote, but the SoC and batteries were chosen because they are expected to still be manufactured 30 years out.

Obvious drawbacks are compared to other laptops it’s under powered, bulky, and expensive, but as one review pointed out, “This is the laptop you'll need when the asteroid hits” [2].

1. https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-01-18-finishing-refor...

2. https://www.inputmag.com/tech/this-is-the-laptop-youll-need-...

foxfluff2• 4 years ago

NXP claims 15 years of longevity for their i.MX8 family. That's not bad, although I don't know what it means in practice (there are many chips that are effectively obsolete but you could still buy them as long as your order quantity is in the tens of thousands at least).

I would not expect the SoC to be available in 30 years, but it's impossible to say for sure. Of course, for the SoM you need other parts as well (LPDDR4).

zuminator• 4 years ago

Chip of Theseus?

evjan• 4 years ago

Underrated comment!

YEwSdObPQT• 4 years ago

I have an Amiga 1200 that is about 25 years old. With some expansions over the years I can do most stuff that I've been doing daily since the mid 90s. Replacement caps, accelerator board and a scan doubler for modern-ish displays (DVI / VGA work fine).

I also own a Core 2 Quad with maxed ram (8gb) that is about 15 years old and it can handle a modern Linux distro quite well. I've added USB 3.0, card readers and I bought a cheap AMD workstation GPU and stuff works ok. If the hardware doesn't fail it probably be okay for another 10 years. If I ran a BSD on there it would last longer.

What normally causes me to upgrade machines are new games and/or heavy weight software stacks and IDEs that eat ram and CPU time.

ultra_nick• 4 years ago

Can electrical circuits last 50 years?

cpsns2• 4 years ago

I have a TRS-80 from 1984 and it still works fine, that's pushing 40 years and I have zero doubt I'll still be able to use it in another ~10.

zepto3• 4 years ago

What can it do?

progre• 4 years ago

Sure! Re-capping is a thing though. Vintage computer enthusiasts will sometimes desolder the old electrolythic capacitors in their machines and replace them with new ones. Apparently 70:ties and 80:ties era caps go bad after 40 years or so.

Findecanor• 4 years ago

If they had been designed to be, I think they can.

In the case of the Commodore 64, which turns 40 this year, there are many that run fine today, but some early revisions have chips that were always prone to run hot. Also, the I/O chips could get damaged from using faulty or alien peripherals because the ports hadn't been designed to protect against them. My 30-year old Amiga 1200 had to get new capacitors last year but my five year older Amiga 500 didn't — because it had capacitors of higher quality in the first place.

An important aspect for longevity is also to design to make parts replaceable: for repair or upgrade. Some people do use 40-50 year old IBM Beam-spring keyboards with their modern computers, but with a new circuit board that has a USB controller.

theodric• 4 years ago

My functioning PDP-8 indicates they can

l0b04• 4 years ago

  > For most typewriters, restoration is only a matter of taking the time to do it. There’s no complex skills or tools involved. Even the most difficult operations could be learned alone, by simple trial and error.

What. Let's say an internal piece failed because of mechanical stress caused by lack of lubrication or a jammed foreign object. How do you figure out "by simple trial and error" which piece failed, why it failed, what the original piece was supposed to look like, and finally repair it, without expert knowledge and precision tools? At a wild guess I'd expect it'd take me a few years to do this reliably, using consumer-grade tools, from stock materials which are not already the exact right size in any dimension.

  > By contrast, we have to change our laptops every three or four years. Our phones every couple of years. And all other pieces of equipment (charger,router, modem,printers,…) need to be changed regularly.

This is conflating "have to" in the sense that it's hard to get useful work done because software no longer runs optimally (or at all) on older hardware, and "have to" in the sense that it's literally broken. I don't "have to" change my laptop any more than someone in the 1950s "had to" change their typewriter for the latest model every few years.

As a side note, a quick search through the article revealed no mention of why you'd want to do this. For fun, sure, but something like this is going to need a business case and lots of cash to be done properly.

zepto3• 4 years ago

Agreed. My current Mac is 8 years old and is easily going to be useful for many more years. I think most people keep their phones for more than 2 years these days.

diffeomorphism2• 4 years ago

Why it failed.

Out of scope. You just want to get it working again and don't care if you have to replace the same piece in another 5 years. Maybe that is not a "proper" repair, but you can do it yourself.

which piece failed

Everything is large enough and mechanical failures are obvious enough that you see what is broken (maybe that part that is literally broken into pieces).

l0b04• 4 years ago

If you don't understand why it failed, you might do more damage with your repair, or you might have to replace it again in a week, rather than five years.

As for being "obvious", I don't understand that sentiment. A broken piece pretty much by definition does not look the way it should, so unless you know the exact design of every piece by heart before starting the repair you're not going to automatically know what it's supposed to look like, in the general case.

drewzero13• 4 years ago

    > How do you figure out "by simple trial and error" which piece failed, why it failed, what the original piece was supposed to look like, and finally repair it, without expert knowledge and precision tools?

Agreed. Restoration of an already usable typewriter might be that simple, but if any of the 2000 parts is damaged or missing good luck finding or fabricating a replacement. (Also good luck finding a service manual!) I love typewriters, I use and collect them, and I've taken a few of them apart for maintenance or repair, and in my experience the mechanisms are too complex to suffer much trial and error without risking further damage.

While reading I couldn't help but notice that the ForeverComputer sounds a lot like a TRS-80 (or indeed many personal computers of the late 70s-early 80s). A TRS-80 CoCo could, with some clever extensions and stretching of the rules, fulfill most of the listed requirements. Plus it's already 42 years old, so it only has 8 more to go!

adrianN2• 4 years ago

Mechanical precision tooling is cheap enough nowadays that the hard part of producing a replacement piece is probably creating a CAD file for it. You can then ship the CAD file to some maker somewhere and have a replacement piece delivered to you for a reasonable fee. That's a lot harder to do with microchips.

corentin88• 4 years ago

no mention of why you'd want to do this

In the introduction, OP says: "Well, given how we use the resources of our planet, the question is not if we could or not. We need to do it, no matter what." I tend to believe he is right about that.

l0b04• 4 years ago

It would be interesting to see some actual calculations around this. It would have to take into account, for example, that we can do (some arbitrarily huge number) more calculations with N grams of rare materials than we could back in the day. If that trend continues for at least another while, investing in a 50-year computer is basically saying we have absolutely no need for that extra computing power.

coldtea5• 4 years ago

How do you figure out "by simple trial and error" which piece failed, why it failed, what the original piece was supposed to look like, and finally repair it, without expert knowledge and precision tools?

For a typewriter? It's not even a challenge, 14 year olds have done bigger projects in their garages. And not even particularly bright 14 year olds - and not even today, with fast access to all kinds of information, schematics and such.

Typewriters? Teenagers have been fixing electronic devices, building custom radios, amplifiers, circuits, and such for over 60 years - with "look at the shelves at Radio Shack" level of availability (and much worse in developing countries).

I've fixed MIDI equipment on my own when I was 14, and I was hardly that bright or familiar with electronics and soldering guns, or had access to the (then non-existing) web. And to be frank, I've never bothered to delve into electronics even later (though I did had some engineering classes at uni).

At a wild guess I'd expect it'd take me a few years to do this reliably

You overblow what should be a couple of weeks or a month at most, and that's for someone mechanics-inept.

l0b04• 4 years ago

Of course buying and swapping a part is something a teenager can do easily. I'm talking about making the parts myself, with consumer-level tools, because unless something like this gets an absolutely gigantic following or backing there's zero chance there'll be spare parts easily available in 10+ years, never mind 50.

firebones• 4 years ago

My HP-11C is going on 36 years old, flawless, and is reportedly Turing complete [1]. Echoing the @dbtc comment that there are likely many special purpose computers that are closing in on this.

[1] https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv020.c...

(If this is inaccurate about the 11c, and I'd love to hear why, then in a few years I'll see how my MacSE is doing. Just doing a casual assessment due to...late night.)

7thaccount2• 4 years ago

My HP-15c feels pretty great. I just bought one of the swissmicros calculators (the DM42) and it has something like an e-ink display with Corning gorilla glass and uses RPN of course. You can get an HP-11c clone too. They aren't cheap garbage either, but feel very solid and have the HP bugs fixed.

These aren't the kind of computer the author is talking about though. They're more concerned about writing and sharing information than performing mathematical calculations.

habeebtc• 4 years ago

The machine will be built to communicate in written format. It means writing and reading. That covers already a lot of use cases. Writing documents. Writing emails. Reading mails, documents, ebooks. Searching on the network for information. Reading blogs and newsletters and newsgroups.

Really, this is most of what I use my phone for. Even the sites I read voraciously are mostly text (where I can get it anyways). Except the occasional streaming during some bored moments, my smartphone experience would be improved by less images and video.

smackeyacky7• 4 years ago

The major problem I see with this is that while the computer itself might still boot, the world around it will have changed so radically it will effectively be useless.

You can see this with machines much younger than 50 years, they can't support the encryption required by most modern websites, interfaces age out of regular use: used a 24 pin parallel port lately? How about a modem?

Even software with long support for ancient machines eventually find it impossible to support older hardware, so you would be stuck with whatever the last release of software was available and likely any vendor would be long dead.

Machines don't age out because they stop working, they simply become obsolete to the surrounding environment. The article glosses over this problem by saying you could stick to simple use cases like email or word processing, but if you can't transfer the data off the machine, you are boned.

adrianN2• 4 years ago

A project like this would be interesting for a computer that controls some other long lived thing, like an industrial control computer. There is an awful number of old beige boxes running Windows 95 controlling some very expensive machinery. The lack of software updates is not a problem (until somebody tries to introduce IIoT...), but finding replacement parts can become quite difficult.

smackeyacky7• 4 years ago

There is a small business near me that has a wool testing machine that absolutely relies on custom DOS 3.3 based software and an old school serial card. They have had to become very astute at picking up old parts to keep their old rigs running as the guy who wrote the control software passed on, and they don't want to invest money in rewriting it. You would think commodity hardware would run this setup but all attempts at shifting it have failed.

The problem with old electronics is that once the chips fall out of fashion, you are never getting replacement parts. Does anybody still manufacture DDR2 ram for example? Its just not that long ago it got replaced by DDR3 and DDR4 but in 10 short years if you need a couple of sticks of it, your only option is 2nd hand. The e-waste issue is very real and the relentless pace of change doesn't help, but I don't have a good answer for solving it.

dusted6• 4 years ago

not too long ago I did a flux image of a floppy, that floppy was required to boot a perfectly good cnc machine, and if it died, the machine would need its computer replaced (read: need to be replaced itself), the floppy drive was then replaced by a floppy emulator with a USB stick, and the guy now has two backups.

It was not too early either, the first tracks of that floppy were visibly worn...

harryvederci• 4 years ago

Good point. Maybe this ForeverComputer could get a swappable component that does the connecting and encrypting? Kinda like you can SSH into a supercomputer from a Raspberry Pi and pretend your Pi itself has all that power.

smackeyacky7• 4 years ago

Well yeah, but like a lot of retro computers that have a Pi emulating a modem or a disk drive as a net gateway, you might as well just use the Pi. People do it for fun or for the challenge, which is awesome. I don't think anybody on a gateway sitting at their C64 pretends that its viable.

I do love reading about that stuff though.

dusted6• 4 years ago

I got to say you're spot on. Keeping things working is no challenge looks at his commodores.

Keeping them relevant is more of a challenge, this is one reason I hate to see people forcing redirects to HTTPS, it's just great and dandy that modern browsers suggest this to users (as long as they don't force), but for vast vast amounts of information, in the free world, you shouldn't force people into always-encrypted. There is zero good reason I shouldn't be able to choose to read Wikipedia unencrypted. And I can do that on pretty much any machine that can somehow crawl onto the Internet.

There's also the problem of "easily replaceable parts", because parts stop being produced, and I think we've been in a golden-age of new-old-stock, and I don't see that continuing in the future. Easily replaceable pose two problems, first, is sourcing the actual part as the world moves on and production stops, the other is that easily replaceable is at odds with industry demand, sure, I personally like 40 pin dip sockets for my hobby electronics, because they're easy to solder, things are large enough I can see them! But I'd not want every appliance I own to be constrained by that, meaning there's no incentive to produce them, leading back to the first problem.

There are so many problems with how to build a machine that lasts, or, even how to build an architecture, or system, that lasts, but they are worthwhile pursuits, discussing and thinking about them is worthwhile, because, systems we can understand, own and service are inherently more valuable than the ones we cannot.

Jaxan• 4 years ago

There is a reason to read Wikipedia via https: ISP can otherwise inject ads or even change the page. This has actually happened.

smackeyacky7• 4 years ago

There is one reason I can think of for encrypting websites, it tells you the information is coming from where you expect and not an interloper.

I agree its worth thinking about about serviceability and longevity but I can't help feeling like it would be like worrying about keeping a PDP 11 running for fifty years.

eternityforest2• 4 years ago

This is a good argument against YAGNI. If we thought 10 years ahead with our designs, the result might not be clean or beautiful, or even optimal, but it might well be better than constantly changing every piece of code we have.

inc• 4 years ago

I'm working on building computers designed to last longer than 50 years. They are primarily for the sort of timeless applications mentioned in the article. It's hard to imagine what people will be doing 50 years in the future, but it's not so difficult to see what people were doing 50 years ago that they're still doing today.

Transferring data off the computers won't be a problem in the future, if people are still interested there will be adapters and interface modules available, or you can make your own because of the open-source hardware, software and documentation. The software won't need to be updated because it won't need to run the latest version of everything.

There will be some advantages to using simpler and less capable computers for certain tasks, but most people will still need a modern computer for doing things like paying taxes and viewing advertisements.

fallingfrog• 4 years ago

It does feel dangerous, somehow, doesn't it, to have the web of technology be so complex? Even something like an automobile- once cars were simple enough that you could take them apart, put them back together, and have a decent chance of doing it right. But now the parts and the computer controlled systems are so complex that you really can't. All the equipment that got left in Afghanistan is a case in point: the Afghan government could never use it, because it was too tightly tied into the whole US infrastructure and support network. Without the satellites and the special maintenance crews it was all useless. Whereas the Taliban had antique gear left over from the Soviet Union, and it was repairable, and it worked.

Joseph Tainter actually links this exact phenomenon to the collapse of civilizations. The theory is that every time a society reaches a crisis, they tend to solve it by making infrastructure and social systems more complex. But more complex means it needs more energy, more education, more expensive maintenance to run. Eventually things reach a tipping point where the social systems are so complicated that adding to the complexity actually makes things worse instead of better. At that point the high energy equilibrium point is unstable, and the system must shift down to a lower complexity equilibrium that requires less energy - oftentimes, much lower. This manifests as collapse. It would be fascinating if this desire that you see manifested often in popular culture for things to be simpler, less systematized (homesteading, anger at government and banks, calls for degrowth) was some kind of subconscious understanding that things were approaching just such a tipping point.

So I get the sentiment. At the same time, our devices are really only useful because of the networks of servers and the billion dollar chip fabs that make them. You can't have something like the modern internet without all that stuff. So I don't see this really working, at least in the short term. That said, you can do a lot of interesting stuff with a low powered machine, and I'd love to play around with one. It would probably run a unix shell just fine. Not sure about emacs though..

foxfluff2• 4 years ago

It does feel dangerous, somehow, doesn't it, to have the web of technology be so complex?

Yes, and it is disappointing that it is being constantly made mode complex even for the functions that our technology has been capable of performing quite well for decades. It's hard to opt out of the web (including the "world wide web").

That said, you can do a lot of interesting stuff with a low powered machine, and I'd love to play around with one.

What could I do to encourage you to do so?

You can play with a low powered machine, get any cheap SBC. If you want less power and want to feel like you really own the machine, get some microcontroller development board and start writing your own tiny OS for it :)

gpsx• 4 years ago

I think this is a noble idea. One thing that makes it difficult is that a computer is designed to execute arbitrary programs. People will always be tempted to "improve" whatever the specification is for this forever computer.

A related thing to think about is what it would take so we don't lose the ability to view old documents or run old programs. Presumable header info in documents, saving versions of programs and having emulators for old machines would by part of the solution. I'm not sure if it would be worth the effort to enact, but it is probably worth thinking about.

smackeyacky7• 4 years ago

The emulation scene is now so good this seems like a solved problem. KVM/QEMU are simply amazing.

sasaf5• 4 years ago

A sturdy laptop with replaceable batteries running emacs. I can see that lasting for 50 years.

bsder• 4 years ago

The TRS-80 Model 100 would like a word with you ...

DocTomoe• 4 years ago

My setup is almost exactly that, and has been going strong for 12 years now (Thank god for the old Thinkpads). The only reason I am pondering to replace the machine is getting the stinkeye from airport security when you put a "laptop" that looks "unusual" through their scanner.

defanor• 4 years ago

Sounds like a fun project. I'll dump assorted thoughts on the topic too:

- Building a laptop (and not a desktop/workstation computer, or a blade/server hardware) makes the task much more difficult than it has to be.

- Even modern Debian is supposed to run on Pentium 1, so that's hardware from 25+ years ago (I suspect the main memory would be a bottleneck though). But now that Moore's law doesn't seem to apply anymore, and unless there will be some unexpected breakthroughs, at least the same 25 years seem fairly easy.

- As anecdata, I've built a computer about a decade ago (had no hardware issues at all since), and another one a couple years ago -- and their specifications are very similar.

- I guess replacement parts may be more of an issue: with hardware interfaces changing, it becomes quite a bit harder to find older ones, just as with any appliances.

- As for interfaces for talking to the outside world, I think so far they change (with breaking compatibility) slower than internal ones, though it can be an issue too. Maybe can be mitigated with analog interfaces where applicable, open hardware and GPIO pins for future hacking, and general attempts to keep compatibility. And adapters, of course.

apricot• 4 years ago

My son is using the Apple ][+ my dad bought in 1979 to play games, learn assembly language, and he even wrote a school paper with Apple Writer. Not quite 50 years yet, but getting close.

karmakaze• 4 years ago

I grew up programming computers without network connections.

I don't think the current generation would think of such a device as a 'computer' any more than they would consider a rotary-dial a 'phone' (seen closer to a telegraph).

I tend to agree to the point in that the point of computers is the softness of software. If it never changes then it could be hardcoded and be like a typewriter but then I wouldn't think of it as a computer, which to me is like a Turing machine and program/data tape, not a particular hard-coded state-machine.

kloch• 4 years ago

This is one problem (of many) that will have to be solved before we can have "generation ships" for interstellar travel.

halo372532• 4 years ago

You can still go online with a 1980's Amiga, send emails, write a novel, etc... Most of which is being talked about here.

Hell you'd be surprised how much you can still do on a old 386 with win 3.1. Pretty much anything word processing was perfected in that era, those old versions of office still work just fine.

While you could write all you wanted with an apple ii, I wouldn't really call that as usable as something like an early version of word which is very familiar for anyone that used word pre ribbon.

halo372532• 4 years ago

I could easily see a Sandy Bridge based laptop still being usable after 50 years, as it being able to run more modern software for the time. But with that being said C2D based hardware has no plans on slowing down anytime soon and still can be used on a daily basis, depending on what hardware graphics it has.

fancyfredbot• 4 years ago

There's no component of a fifty year old computer I'd want to use today. Maybe when we've reached the limits of Moore's law, perfected display technology, wireless networking, and hit the limits to communication bus performance designing computers to last fifty years will be more appealing. Doing that today would just mean more waste when all the components become obsolete and it's cheaper to replace than upgrade.

7thaccount2• 4 years ago

I think some on here (that are just saying my Amiga or TRS-80 can already do that) may be missing the greater point even though they're not necessarily wrong.

I don't think the author is just talking about the computer, but kick-starting an entirely new movement from like-minded folks.

1.) This would of course need to include a pretty simple computer that has parts which could be replaced for decades. I'm thinking about something as potentially simple as a C64, but without all of the video chip stuff. Maybe closer to Ben Eater's computer, but a step up.

2.) This will need the right amount of peripherals. At minimum I think you'd need to be able to interact with an SD card, keyboard, e-ink display, battery, and the internet. I'm sure you may need something else as well. SD card isn't a requirement though. Maybe something else that is simpler, but still functional could work?

3.) This will need the right amount of software. Obviously Linux is out as an OS unless it is massively stripped down. If the hardware is as restrictive as a C64 or worse, then you'd have to do something very simple that is hardly an OS. I think a Forth layer over the hardware would be perfect. It would have some basic functionality as well as some applications like a very simple text editor, BBS, some kind of way to do text only web pages (not a web guy, so no clue if this would work), and maybe perform simple calculations. The original iOS from the Rebol guy (Carl Sassenrath, not Apple) had this interesting concept of sharing code over the internet. The core would be incredibly simple, but people could always add on whatever they wanted.

I'll add that I often think about getting to use a computer like this for everything not work related. There are some interesting ideas out there showing what computers could have been.

eternityforest2• 4 years ago

The problem I see is that... I like having a phone and a laptop. Since we will never be able to fully participate in the modern world without them, unless society changes majorly, I would rather use the device I already have.

An ideal forever computer would just be a very reliable modern laptop with a replaceable battery and a software suite that people somehow agree to maintain for the next few decades.

It's possible now that we are at the good enough stage. Basic everyday tasks are no longer a challenge for CPUs, so in theory current laptops should be good till they break.

If I were to actually want to build something myself, it would be a pi4 based cyberdeck powered by lithium titanate batteries.

The author is a software guy, which is good, because most of the cool stuff he proposes can be done in software.

The computer built to last 50 years (2021)

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