I'm only doing a few things on machine with around 32GHz worth of processing power (# of processors * GHz) that I couldn't do on my 80486 running 33MHz with a few MB of RAM. Emacs starts up a little bit faster. Pages in Chrome are more interactive than in Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape. My word processor fits more text.
On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly bought the ability to have most of the code that runs be interpreted or JITed rather than statically compiled, to play videos, to do some heavy numerics and graphics (including things like family photos and videos), and so on.
It's hard to think of anything I really /need/ in a life-or-death sense or an economic-survival sense that couldn't be done on older hardware with appropriate software. There's a ton of things I want, that help, or where migrations would be massive projects.
If computers were to entirely disappear, and I couldn't automate things, communicate digitally (emails, messaging), word process, write code, I think that'd be a major systemic-collapse-level implosion of society. A lot of people would simply die.
On the other hand, if computers were to regress to 33MHz-level performance, Youtube isn't sticking around, but we'd likely adapt as a society with some structural change, but without such a collapse.
Older levels of performance wouldn't cripple humanity. But putting together something that actually works out of a big parts bin is a crapshoot, and supporting a deployment of machines which are each completely unique is an IT nightmare.
I think the best chances to get something useful would be to collect x86 consoles. x86 means you've got a well supported target, and consoles means you've got limited hardware variations.
Military could probably pressure Microsoft to give them some way to turn an original xbox into a PC; and if you give people $50 for an original xbox most will be happy.
There are a number of commonly-used microcontrollers. Z80 comes to mind. So does Atmel. So do a few common ARM variants. If you can cover those, you're not in bad shape.
As an end user it would be manageable but dont forget that the whole world runs on servers and many Industries would collapse if computing power is gone
I feel like BBSes did okay for most purposes over 300 baud modems. I mean, I'm not getting a picture of what I'm buying on Amazon, unless I want to wait 5 minutes for it to download, but I can still make the purchase.
On the server side, you'll be running C code rather than a nice high-level language, but it will get the job done. You might not have all the ML which lets me get the most relevant product recommended, but....
Emails definitely won't be HTML, but they'll come through.
On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly bought the ability to have most of the code that runs be interpreted or JITed rather than statically compiled, to play videos, to do some heavy numerics and graphics (including things like family photos and videos), and so on.
It's hard to think of anything I really /need/ in a life-or-death sense or an economic-survival sense that couldn't be done on older hardware with appropriate software. There's a ton of things I want, that help, or where migrations would be massive projects.
If computers were to entirely disappear, and I couldn't automate things, communicate digitally (emails, messaging), word process, write code, I think that'd be a major systemic-collapse-level implosion of society. A lot of people would simply die.
On the other hand, if computers were to regress to 33MHz-level performance, Youtube isn't sticking around, but we'd likely adapt as a society with some structural change, but without such a collapse.