[Worldbuilding] Divergent, retro and other 'not of this world' Computers and Software

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

It's also worth noting that vacuum tubes don't need to be tall - it's the width that matters. So you can miniaturize vacuum tube computers quite a bit. 1mm tall slices, but 1cm wide and 0.5-1cm long. Can make for practical vacuum tube mainframes in a few cubic meters.

And vacuum tube computers can be analogue, digital, or composite!

Don't vacuum tubes burn out and need to be replaced?

I had an idea some time ago, for one of the tech paradigms in my space opera setting, to involve boards of miniaturized vacuum tubes (each a bit smaller than rice grains) that are externally mounted on the computer, e.g. a hacker's cyberdeck, and maybe with a little built-in fault tolerance so that if any one single tube burns out, the board still works fine (each computer or deck has many such boards, from several to hundreds), and if 2-4 tubes burn out that board still works but at increasingly reduced efficiency. Indicator LEDs turn on to indicate the severity of need for replacement, and someone them manually has to watch and replace as needed, e.g. the hacker's assistent.