The use of the word dependencies in this context is perfect.

Untangling the history of technological innovation is an adventure into dependency hell.

It could be a pretty nice 'coffee table book': a walk through history of inventions, with the dependencies of each one listed (to one or maybe two degrees only of course).

You could pick it up anywhere, read forwards; back from something specific (or forward, if you made it a doubly linked list?); or back from whatever 'the end' would be.

You might be interested in James Burke's TV Show Connections!

Which does this sort of thing for like 8 episodes. Go and learn why you can't have cars without swamp gasses!

Connections is also a book too!

It would be interesting to see if there's a way this dependency graph could be captured and saved for future generations in the event of civilisation collapsing. I suspect something like that would rapidly reduce the time it takes for society to rebuild because it wouldn't have to spend energy figuring out what doesn't work all over again as much.

Both of you might be interested to check out "How to Invent Everything" [1] - it's even got flowcharts the kind you mention at the end! [2]

[1] https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ [2] https://mohamadacma.com/content/images/2022/04/825235c6-665f...

Cheers for this, looks interesting!

Hell, even today if a CME or something wipes out our electronics we'll have to go way back to vacuum tubes or even simpler setups to restore our society since most modern electronics need modern electronics to be designed and manufactured.

You can make something as complicated as a 6502 processor with just electricity for furnaces, motors, and pumps, without using any electronics.

You’d have to go back to hand-cut Rubylith for the mask sets.

Hand made transistors are no problem, just more expensive.

People still do this stuff for fun too. So it's not some lost knowledge.

I wouldn't be surprised if some colleges taught this as part of a history of computers course.

Most Romans (excluding the salves who were not Romans despite being the majority in Rome) would have been better off with a good steam engine. However before you get to good you need to go through a lot of working toys that are not worth having. Tractors (tractors have replaced almost half historical human labor, with various automated spinning/weaving machines most of the rest - everything else done by humans, slaves or not is a footnote) are vastly better than slaves, but there is a reason when John Deere bought a tractor company in 1918 they wrote all their dealers something to the effect of the horse drawn plow will always be the backbone of the American farm - early tractors were not better than human labor in general.

Slavery was largely defunct for it's last ~250 years as serfdom-like systems took over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Byzantine_Empir...