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Comment by reaperducer

7 years ago

the shrill hissing and whining noises of a workshop are one of the more fatiguing sounds to hear.

Can confirm.

In the early 2000's, I built a web site for a small factory that ran almost entirely on compressed air. Part of the project involved spending six months on the production floor photographing items as they were built. (15,000 different SKUs!)

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reaperducer

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saagarjha  7 years ago

I wonder if you could get the website itself to run on compressed air…

  • bipson  7 years ago

    Do you really wonder?

    The answer would be "Of course!" and "Of course not!".

    You don't need electricity to run a "computer". But as soon as you're trying to hook up this computer to the Internet, serving responses on an electrical network... I can't imagine how to do this without electricity.

    Of course you're not looking for answers using a turbine, are you?

    • brutt  7 years ago

      For TCP/IP, you can use acoustic modem. It's hard, but not impossible to make mechanical computer and mechanical acoustic modem or vibrational modem (vibrations are easier to parse using mechanics).

      2 replies →

    • petra  7 years ago

      Here they talk about a miniatirized pneumatic microprocessor using microfluidics:

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917228/

      But: it takes a full 10cm wafer to make 50 D flip-flops(a basic component equivalent to a memory bit), and it works at frequency of 0.5hz .

      So it's a challenge.

      But maybe it's possible to build a very dumb terminal with this(say keyboard + screen

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41378-018-0018-1

      ) , if you offload everything to the cloud - and use a really basic communications protocol.

      But will the Amish accept a computer/network ? What will it look like ?

      1 reply →

    • rebuilder  7 years ago

      Well, fiber optic cable uses light to transmit data... a vibrating mirror could modulate the output. How to receive, well, that seems a bit harder! Also probably some small issues with precise timing and bitrate are to be expected.

      2 replies →