What is a permacomputer?
TL/DR
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 land management and settlement design of permaculture.
Is this a kit project?
It is a project pipe-dream to end up distributing permacomputer units at a kind of cottage-industry level, perhaps something for a worker’s co-operative to do.
These units will be really, really cheap–if it’s not cheap, it’s not accessible to the poor.
What is the point of this project?
The original purpose of this project was to design and then construct computers that would be able to survive a societal collapse.
After working on the project, it became apparent that the point of the project should not be to imagine a hypothetical future, but to engage practically with the problems of the present.
The entire computing stack of the modern era is large, confusing, and unsafe. People would rather excuse themselves from having to learn about it. Who can blame them?
The first aim of the project is to be exceedingly cost effective: “if the oppressed cannot access some technology, then it is not revolutionary”.
The second aim of the project is the promotion of digital literacy. Digital literacy should promote a joyful user experience that is non-exploitative. It should also foster a sense of community–“no-one is an island”.
To this end, the scope of the people’s permacomputer project was deliberately limited to programs around or just over 100 lines. Definitely not more than 200.
The project therefore decided to investigate BASIC as the paradigmatic human-computer interface for the permacomputer.
For the application towards which it was targeted, the investigation the project has done so far into BASIC has been fruitful, and even quite surprising–the 70s/80s hobby computing scene was far richer and more creative than the project previously assumed: not less than five (5) different text editors in BASIC were unearthed!
Have you heard about … ?
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 plethora 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.
Are you serious?
This project should largely be regarded as a piece of art. If someone finds some practical use for what we are building, however, that would also give us joy.
What traditions inspire this project?
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 heterogeneous 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.