Now _that_ would be very cool! I can imagine a computing device driven by solar or wind. But when it comes to solar or wind, the important part isn't energy usage as much as it is dealing with inconsistent energy output. Here we'd want to design computers for situations with varying amounts of available power. But that's much more nuanced than "low power".
> Also since data storage is constantly moving to be more volatile, complex to decode and distributed in space, we might want to start encoding our knowledge as the ancient civilizations did, in stone, but with some easy to decode language (think Voyager probe). That would be permastorage.
That too would be very cool. Not sure if you've read over VPRI's paper on digital Cuneiform Tablets [1] but it's a great read in that vein.
To bring it back to this article:
> You already know the answers! They’d use less power; they’d be hardy against the elements
Less power than what? Are current low-power SOCs not enough? Do we need even lower power? What exactly _is_ the power budget and where do we see this deployed? Why would they need to be hardy against the elements; books certainly are _not_.
> The whole stack, from the hardware to the boot loader to the OS (if there is one) to the application, would be something that a person could hold in their head.
I mean, whose head? A kernel programmer can probably hold a very different set of things in their head than a network engineer than a web programmer and so on. One person's "easy" is another person's "hard". So how do we define "hold in their head"?
> Basically every computer used to be like that, up until the 1980s or so;
Were they? Documentation and manuals were expensive and hard to find. There was no place to ask questions and receive answers like forums or StackOverflow. Computing time was scarce. Only in _hindsight_, now that we have web pages describing these older architectures and their machine code available at our fingertips do these architectures seem easily comprehensible. But at the time, with computer time being scarce and manuals being expensive, this mostly wasn't the case. (This is my other problem with permacomputing, the weird Lindy-effect exoneration.)
> I find this totally evocative: it’s easy to imagine future permacomputers that rely, for some of their functions, on artifacts from a time before permacomputing. It would be impossible, or at least forbiddingly difficult, to produce new model files, so the old ones would be ferried around like precious grimoires …
I mean, if I were larping as the monk protagonist of a post-apocalyptic movie sure, but otherwise I don't see how this is desirable.
I'd take permacomputing more seriously if it actually defined terms like "lower power" (how many mW is "low") and then tried to actually motivate why these things tie into their vision of permacomputing.
EDIT: I also _always_ get downvoted without explanation when I raise anti-permacomputing viewpoints which also leaves a bad taste in my mouth when discussing this topic.