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Celebrating 'First Silicon'
Dee and some of the other members of the Bayesian Nakama are celebrating the construction of the first full-fledged computer built entirely out of local, asteroidal resources and processes. The chip design they're using, the 6502, is roughly a century old - but its 3510 transistors can all be laid out manually, and then the design shrank through the best analog photolithography techniques they've been able to figure out so far. A CPU working at a single megahertz may not seem like much - but it's better than the spyware-laden hardware from Earth, or the massively expensive chips manufactured on and imported from Luna, or nothing at all. And now that they've achieved this, they've made a real stride towards bootstrapping themselves to complete technological independence.
From left to right: Zot (anteater), Dee (rat in taur prosthetic), Bongo (wolf), Quux (goat), Bar (donkey).
Drawn by
sethtriggs
From left to right: Zot (anteater), Dee (rat in taur prosthetic), Bongo (wolf), Quux (goat), Bar (donkey).
Drawn by
sethtriggs
Category Artwork (Traditional) / General Furry Art
Species Rat
Size 897 x 657px
File Size 111.9 kB
Listed in Folders
Eeyup; something like that is what they plan on assembling a lot of, now that they can. (Though the machine Dee is turning on in the picture is probably closer to an Apple 1.)
Of course, Dee, being who she is, has written an operating system from scratch, based on the various ideas she's picked up in the roughly-a-century since the original Apple ]['s, specifically to minimize the disruption of having to transition to new OSes as better computers get designed - if she did things the way she hopes she did, people using Bayesian_OS will be able to smoothly upgrade from an 1977-era machine to 2020-and-later-era machines. (Not that she's stopping anyone else from writing their own software - that would kind of defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, after all.)
Of course, Dee, being who she is, has written an operating system from scratch, based on the various ideas she's picked up in the roughly-a-century since the original Apple ]['s, specifically to minimize the disruption of having to transition to new OSes as better computers get designed - if she did things the way she hopes she did, people using Bayesian_OS will be able to smoothly upgrade from an 1977-era machine to 2020-and-later-era machines. (Not that she's stopping anyone else from writing their own software - that would kind of defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, after all.)
One of the current debates among their working group is whether to start tooling up immediately for a single-chip microcontroller with what they can build now, or wait a bit to see if they can finish cracking the problem of making non-volatile RAM (eg, EEPROMs) out of local materials. That partly fed into their decision to use their available manufacturing capability to start making some multi-chip microcomputers, which would provide their fledgling little colony with some good value while they keep researching.
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