The People's Permacomputer Project

The People's Permacomputer (henceforth known as "the people's computer", or "the permacomputer") is a project dedicated to resourcing the specification, and then construction of a 'permacomputer'.

Who?

"The Committee"

• 50hz

• shufei

• vidak

• permacomputing matrix space

Yes you can join the committee.

What is a permacomputer?

A permacomputer is a computer which attempts to embody the virtues of permacomputing.

Foundationally, permacomputing itself is set of community practices and traditions which shares a set of social and ecological values inspired by the 70s land management and settlement design of permaculture.

What is the point of this project?

There are many different dialectical approaches to making an introduction to the people's permacomputer. One thought experiment that has proved especially popular and easy to grasp sums up the mindset behind which we are functioning:

Industrial society has collapsed. All semiconductor fabrication has ceased, society-wide electrification is no longer guaranteed. There is no longer any internet. Computing as it was once known in the early 21st century is impossible. You need a computer for a task. What do you do?

This project is a response to the challenge posed by the above problem. The purpose of this project is to design and then construct computers that will be able to survive a societal collapse.

A permacomputer for the people involves two radically differing criteria of success, yet these requirements, paradoxically, cannot be separated from one another--fulfilling both these two criteria is required for a successful project.

The first criterion is a computer which is well-engineered. The computer offered up by this project aim to be easy to grasp upon immediate interaction, and have a profound, transformational effect on the power of the user's capacity for rational and critical thought.

Permacomputers must also be rugged and durable. An inoperable computer is otherwise known in hacker circles as a "brick". The length of time the project determined adequate for the "life span" of a permacomputer is a duration far in excess of contemporary standards. The intention behind this project's design was to allow communities of people to possess and maintain a computer collectively.

It is difficult to provide an accurate estimate for exactly how many years the life cycle of a permacomputer design can be. This project suggests a life span beyond that of a human individual.

Despite this concern, this project assumes that are threats outside the domain of engineering to the permacomputer, which would otherwise possess indefinite operation:

The second criterion is to ensure that there continues to be a human cultural tradition of electronic computing, or that this tradition may be able to be rediscovered or reconstructed. The project does not want to merely effect an engineering feat, but also transmit the cultural memory of electronic digital computing into the future.

It is hoped that, should the project succeed, humanity will be able to be saved from the grueling tedium of many forms of onerous economic work. Without a computer, these necessary social roles would involve either great effort, or be personally unfulfilling or degrading; shameful.

Mutual exclusion

There are many influential projects which attempt to address the same set of values driving the people's permacomputer project. Some worthy of note can be listed in no particular order:

• Collapse OS.
• uxn.
• The RC2014 computer kit.
• Ben Eater's 6502 project video series.

All of these projects are concerned with some subset of the principles the permacomputer project holds dear. Collapse OS is software that aims to be system agnostic, and assumes the previous acquisition of some supported hardware.

The uxn ecosystem is rich and continues to flourish. This project shares much with our own concerns for sustainability and the long-term persistence of electronic computing, but we diverge from uxn on one fundamental point: the uxn ecosystem is a virtual computer, and while an actual one, is not intended to be a physical one. This is a delicate point because the audiences between the different projects are in many ways intersecting. That said, uxn is (very consciously) an emulator. The people's computer project aims to quite literally place completed general purpose computers into people's possession.

While one horn of the dilemma may be expressed as "software without dedicated hardware", the reverse can be said to be true of the plerotha of projects similar to the RC2014, and Ben Eater's breadboard 6502 project. In this case, it is "hardware without dedicated software".

These two aspects of a general purpose computer--its own unique physical construction, and its capacity to perform abstraction through judicious programming--are usually siloed off from one-another intellectually.

In this way, the people's permacomputer is an attempt to blend, and thoroughly combine two previously mutually exclusive set of practices which, even if they were only able to survive the collapse in part, are invaluable when applied correctly.

Project phase one results

Our research was long and laborious. When the results of our information gathering started to become clearer, we discovered that it was not appropriate to offer up any one particular token computer hardware platform.

A ** Mike Bauer's DREAM 6800.

Please see the README of this project's previous phase.

B ** Permacomputers derived from popular microcontroller kits. See ulisp.

This particular course of action would require:

• a text editor
• a telnet client
• a gopher browser

All this software will be run over serial at first, and then the perpetually thorny topic of video out can be tackled later.

(Will video displays of the solarpunk post-apocalypse future even mostly support composite out?)

See this fedi discussion.

And this earlier one too.

C ** The EDUC-8 PDP-8 clone.

See here.

Also this fediverse post.

D ** A minimalistic serial-only 6502 homebrew platform

This proof-of-concept design is perfect for an ultra-simple and easily-constructed computer.

This is the memory map:

Address - Component
$0000-$3FFF - RAM (16KB)
$4200-$4203 - ACIA
$6000-$600F - VIA
$8000-$FFFF - ROM (32KB)

The benefits of this design are many:

• It uses a 6502, not the relatively exotic 6800
• Will easily run FORTH and BASIC
• Much easier and simpler memory addressing logic
• Quite a luxurious amount of ROM, and this presents a good opportunity to pack it full of interesting things, such as FORTH words, BASIC variants with larger ROM footprints...
• Possesses serial through the ACIA chip

However the following things are removed from the DREAM6800 design:

• Before was planned a simple hex keyboard. this new design must communicate through serial only.
• No composite video out. One of the great benefits of the DREAM6800 design was its relatively simple DMA video out circuitry. A lot of extra work is going to have to be done in order to give this design composite video out. This also means a serial terminal will be needed at all times in order to run this new 6502 design.
• The virtual machine that ran on the DREAM6800, the CHIP-8 will not be included in this design.

The new even simpler design is a clear victor in the comparison between the old and the new.

• People are unlikely to be able to quickly understand the DREAM6800 design software-wise, due to the 6800 ISA being far less well understood in the community. the 6502 guarantees a well understood and loved ISA. It makes the design more attractive to others.

• Composite out may not necessarily be the best option for video for a permacomputer. The project will actually need to do research in order to find out what will work best long-term.

• Although the CHIP-8 virtual machine instruction set is simpler to write on paper, higher level languages like FORTH and BASIC are more likely to be better preserved in the far future.

  See this fedi reference.

Adventures in the traditions of computation

We seem to take it for granted that a computer in everyone's hand just is democratic computing. Indeed, the ubiquity of contemporary computation has been confused for 'democracy'.

As quickly as we marched towards computing for the masses, we marched just as swiftly away.

GNU

There do today however still exist flourishing movements which are worthy of mention--although not exclusive in this honour, much of the GNU movement is to be credited with any sanity being preserved in present-day mass computation.

Hobbyist computing

The hobbyist computer movement of the 1970s was rich in ideas, and courageous--sometimes breathtaking--in its efforts to allow the lay person to realise their access to an electronic computer.

Need we speak of the heterogenous array of kit computers and their attendant clubs and magazines? Some of mention are entire influential computing platforms in their own right:

• Altair 8800.
• Apple I and II.
• Commodore 64 and the VIC-20.

From minicomputers to microcomputers

One may even be able to recount the history of computing before its entry into the mass consciousness. Computer architectures from (now defunct) firms like DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) still carry enormous significance today.

Much of DEC's fascinating and progressive work culture is imprinted on the fruits of their labour. Two models of computer from DEC in particular, the PDP-8 and the PDP-11, are steeped in the corporation's ethos: "do the right thing".

Neither of these machines were of much relevance outside the academy and industry, but they represent huge strides forward in human history for the virtues that the people's computer committee see as necessary for permacomputing.

In particular, the full plans and maintenance manuals for each token computer were accessible alongside each physical device:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp8/

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/

When was the last time the entire structure of a modern smartphone was exposed and made accessible to the user? Indeed, the devices we take for granted today are deliberately obfuscated for the purpose of unchecked economic profit.