[geeks] Wishful thinking... Discussion primer

Nick B nick at pelagiris.org
Thu May 26 18:52:35 CDT 2016


I think, honestly, your problem becomes political stability and will.
Maersk quotes a 40' container at 2,366 cubic feet or 67m3, and a 20'
container at 1,165 cubic feet or 33m3 (and, amusingly, almost the exact
same weight - 28,300 kg for the 20', 28,870 kg for the 40').  For data
storage, you'd produce several (3? 5?) copies of each document you wanted
to retain on BD or similar, Millenniata claims to produce a BD-r good for
1000 years, 25G each, call it 4 cubic feet of them, one in each corner
gives you a minimum of about 4 terabytes, or if you go with micro-sd
cards... the sky's the limit, heck, mix em.  You don't want to export 14nm
technology, the gain just isn't there, send out some late 80s or early 90s
tech, fairly easy to fix/replicate, 1um or 500nm tech.  And whatever you
do, don't let a whisper of Visual Basic through...
Nick

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 7:07 PM, Bill Bradford <mrbill at mrbill.net> wrote:

> Copying this here from my Facebook post.. Would love to see thoughts.
>
>
>
> How much technological change could you bring about by taking a shipping
> container full of 2016-era computers (and full copy of wikipedia) to 1975?
>
> Presume the shipping container has enough equipment to set up a couple of
> small
> datacenters along with numerous desktop workstations, and all required
> networking gear, switches, routers, and spare parts.
> Also included: Installable copies of all major operating systems
> (especially
> free/open source ones with full source code), along with stuff like simh
> for
> emulation of 1975-current hardware on the faster gear.
> What else would you be sure to include??
>
>
>
> Alternate discussion:
> Given the same shipping container full of stuff, what year would you take
> it
> back to, to have maximum impact?
> The transistor was invented in 1947...
>
> Assuming that you've got the entire container of gear for reference
> information, what timeframe would the receiving society be able to start
> replicating (on a smaller/less intricate scale) stuff like early ICs?
>
>
>
> Discuss!
>
> Bill
>
> --
> Bill Bradford
> Houston, Texas USA
> _______________________________________________
> GEEKS:  http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks


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