!Re: Lateral thinking with withered tech --- agk's diary 14 April 2026 @ 02:12 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC at night --- Solderpunk wrote about a design philosophy I want to internalize. A Nintendo engineer used old tech in new products, like the GameBoy monochrome display. This kept cost down and the focus on building fun games instead of new tech demos. Solderpunk suggested this as an approach to salvage computing. If we want to live within our means, don't prioritize manufacturing small-batch low-power e-paper display new things, be more creative in repurposing old things. I'm dreaming up and hopefully making some DOS-based systems for children in my community. As a thought experiment, I dreamed a mass-adopted machine with an entirely reshored supply chain that could do the same thing as the boutique salvage computers I'm making. I keep rethinking it all from first principles as I wait for a nearby liberal arts college to donate ten "old" laptops to a nearby makerspace for me to repurpose. Dreaming up new manufacture is retreat into fantasy where machines were designed to be easy to repurpose. Such a world would be one in which manufacture stops, as typewriter manufacture stopped -- there were enough, given maintenance and repair. Maybe a few things I fantasized would be useful for salvage computing. I'm imagining a mass idiom for computing. Something as straightforward as, "you turn the key in the ignition or push the button and the car is on. It drives like other cars." 1. Most people (including me) don't want to be administrators. They don't want to install an OS, manually update their system, etc. 2. There are generally two kinds of computers: term- inals and mainframes. Powerful institutions generally do the administration on the mainframe (well, data center), and ultimately control the terminal, too. 3. The alternative idiom, in videogames, is the off- line system that plays a game from a cart or CD. In office work and education, it is the offline system that boots from a diskette. Boot from removable media The key, I think, is to emulate that cart/CD/floppy computing idiom. I should be able to turn a computer off, stick in a CF card, SD card, USB pendrive, or PC card, and boot into the system on the removable media. Two drives, one for the system and the other for file storage, is golden. I like the size, tactility, and clarity of contents of PC cards, CF cards, game carts, and diskettes, but we have the machines we have. I want to give my child an educational computer gaming environment: Stick in the FUZOMA card, turn it on. That's the whole system. The kid can play number muncher, tetris, UCB LOGO, and two dozen other educational DOS and C64 games, can write, learn typing, etc. She can't accidentally mess up my system, or escape to the Italian brainrot to Elsagate gore video pipe- line. She has a complete system she can understand and troubleshoot to explore. I want to do distraction-free writing. Stick in a card that just has an editor on it: for mass adoption, something like Tilde text editor on a headless unix system that acts like a hypervisor is great. The vi clone that runs on DOS is good for me. A card could have an office suite like the one that runs on HP palmtop PCs (Lotus 123, HP calc, Data base, Appointments, Memo, DOS prompt), a creative suite like uxn/Varvara or Decker's Hypercard reboot, or a full OS like emacs. It could enable networking, and let you touch the "mainframe" with an email/news/rss/offpunk reader or telnet/ftp/ssh client. It could even do general- purpose computing. Extend the machine with removable media Most of the ROMs I described above run ok from a 1.44 MB floppy on a 7.96 MHz 80186 embedded CPU designed in 1982 with 1 to 4 MB of memory (640 KB RAM, the rest used for expanded RAM or storage). Most run well on a 33 MHz 80386 designed in 1985 and made for 22 years with a 1 micrometer process node. The software would positively scream on an 486 designed in 1989. You want to ssh? You need a network controller, maybe wireless networking chip, and a cryptographic co-processor. Your otherwise snappy machine can't compute those cyphers. Everything you need's on an ESP32. The 240 MHz Xtensa LX RISC processor designed in 2008 and made for more than 20 years on a 40 nanometer process node is plenty. If you stuck an ESP32 in a PC card and fed it milli- amps at 3.3V, you could telnet to it and ssh from it. You can do the same thing over an RS232 serial line or a usb wifi dongle. PC cards were used to add disk drives, audio ins and outs, networking, extra RAM, industrial controllers, and other capabilities. Removable media can be what you boot from, and how a simple base system is extended when needed. The problem Can't boot DOS on UEFI machines. The first batch of computers the nearby college is getting rid of are 2019 intel iMac desktops. I can't use them. They're getting e-wasted instead of repurposed. If only they were ten years older. Even if there isn't some absolute limit like UEFI vs DOS, nearly no one wants to be a sysadmin for their personal computer. Putting DOS, a Linux or BSD, LineageOS, PostmarketOS, GrapheneOS, or OpenWrt on something isn't generally just sticking in a floppy and turning it on. It requires expertise, risk, and time. "Does it run on this device and how?" teaches nerds about processor architectures, bootloaders, and firmware, but more generally turns working computers with excessively fast processors and seemingly end- less memory into e-waste. Lateral thinking with withered tech The GameBoy is fun, easy to use, durable, expandable with game carts, never needs to be updated, and doesn't require a sysadmin or "mainframe time" to operate. The GameBoy of salvage computing needs to check the same boxes. The repair malls that will accumulate withered tech and breathe such life into it in my imagined future Kentucky have to get from machines hostile to re-use to something broadly useful/fun. How much of this involves hardware/software "glue" or compatability layers? For example, aftermarket firmware, a plug-in module, or a hypervisor to support extensability (including booting) via some widely-available, cheap external media? Something's plugged in, jumpered, or soldered to the old gaming system, smartphone, Alexa, or TV so you can plug in a keyboard and boot something its makers did not intend. How much involves destructive repurposing? For example, desoldering or replacing components, or repurposing components in new PCBs? How much of this is possible with modern electronics, and which electronics specifically? Not just general purpose computing People mostly seem to use computers and smartphones as TVs, not PCs. The TV-ish elements of webapps are some of the most resource-intensive and biggest security risks. Rendering, authentication, rich media serving and posting, and tracking/profiling drive obsolescence. Much of the degrowth/ecosocialist/permacomputing focus is on the personal computer. The questions are things like, "How will I store my family photos for 50 years?" I think that's a weak foundation. When I was imagin- ing a reshored supply chain, I was imagining higher prices and demand destruction. I originally imagined replacing chromebooks and tablets in schools: 700,000 users in Kentucky would be a good design target. Then it was blindingly obvious. One computer per student was sold to improve classroom discipline, enabling further short-staffing teachers and distancing education. Now it's rightly blamed for poor classroom discipline, inattention, and impaired learning. The 2018/2019-era glamour is gone. 700,000 students don't need whatever I'm imagining. But cars and e-bikes do. Medical devices, industrial processes, communications routing, and construction and farming equipment do. Scientific instrumentation does. A 466MHz Vortex86EX embedded system board in a little box with PC card slots could do that stuff or do personal computing, depending on what PC cards extend the system. It's a late-90s architecture still in production. In the salvage version, how can the guts ripped out of Flock cameras and broken smartphones be extended in some reproducable way by remanufacture to be repeatedly repurposable by ordinary end-operators? You should just have to plug in an irrigation card to run the drip irrigation system, a standard medic- al interface card to run the vital signs machine, or a gaming card to read game ROMs and, well, game. The goldentree of tech is grey So I wait for the nearby college to decommission its Dell laptops from 2019 or 2020 so I can boot 1.44 MB of DOS games on them for kids in my community, wishing there was a way to repurpose something simpler to do such a simple thing. And thinking about how to keep them alive for 50 years, cannibalizing each other for parts, being repurposed over and over like GameBoy when you stick in a new game cartridge, never demanding a system administrator; never barring one either.