2081 Coding-Kit

The programming and data devices of Zaza Wachtang, her coding kit.

Everything she needed to program electronic devices without networks: energy, data, and compute.

Before the crash, Zaza Wachtang was a systems integrator for individualized consumer electronics appliances. She designed devices according to her customers' requirements. She assembled systems programming or configuring their components. SmartHome or Quadcopter, Pedelec-Sharing or ThermoMax, all appliances contain electronics. They have speech recognition and gesture control, sensors and data processing, cloud connection and power supply, in ever new arrangements and configurations. Zaza Wachtang was specialized in outdoor and off-grid appliances. She built systems that worked without ubiquitous data and compute networks.

Then came the crash.

All networks failed.

Not just electricity, water, and mobile networks. Even computing was no longer available because compute power came primarily from the cloud. Being stored online all data was lost. Voice controlled devices could no longer be operated. Even switching to local gesture control left users without their situation-aware knowledge navigator, which used to rummage the knowledge of the world on its own.

At some point it became clear that the crisis would last longer. One year after the crash, there were still no networks. Normal everyday devices were not usable, not even with an improvised power supply, because everything had relied on networks and online services. Some refrigerators did not work because they used cloud components for control or simply because they contacted the manufacturer to renew the license while trying to boot up (keyword: Kitchen on Demand). Modern bicycles did not brake anymore because no cables have been used by the bike industry since the drive-by-wireless trend of the 2060s. Pay-as-you-go rental bikes would not work without their servers anyway.

Luckily, Wachtang had the experience and the equipment to run IT without online networks. So, she was able to repair appliances. Some of them could be reprogrammed. For others, she simulated a network and servers. Zaza Wachtang got things going again. Word got around.

A year after the crash, she was running the ROBOit IT-repair center. Her team not only repaired equipment, but also preserved IT hardware, hardware designs, software, and source codes. By preserving the ROBOit knowledge base and by accumulating infrastructure around ROBOit, she contributed decisively to overcoming the crisis in the Caucasus region.

Zaza worked with this equipment:

  • A DIN A4 ePaper Display, sandwiched between a transparent foil and a solid plastic sheet. Actually, ePaper can be folded and rolled. However, every device that is still working is highly valuable since there are no more spare parts. Trying to minimize wear and tear bending the ePaper must be avoided at all costs. So, people also dispense with multitouch in order to protect the paper. A gesture scanner is mounted at the edges of the paper instead.
  • Several multi-functional networking hubs: small boxes that can connect all electronic parts with so-called net-threads. A hub can connect display, storage, compute, grok, network, and input devices. It can communicate wirelessly. This was the standard operating mode before the crash. But since there is no ubiquitous power supply anymore, wired operation is more practical, because net-threads carry not only data but also power.
  • A memory bank with all of humanity's public knowledge from before the crash and also lots of free space. The data is now worth its weight in gold, as it includes operating instructions, circuit diagrams, and software needed for repairs.
  • A compute cube for classical numerical data processing with 2,000 k CPUs of 10 Tops each. Local computing power is rather unusual in the consumer sector. The cube comes from a scientific institute. It has an 8 x 8 net-thread array for fast local storage.
  • A professional grokker: neural network hardware for cognition-oriented tasks such as speech recognition, data segmentation, problem classification and automatic modeling. This is a rare item from a data center of a former cloud service provider in Baku.
  • A commercially available hardware firewall. The firewall contains specialized compute and grok elements that perform simulation-based analysis to detect aggressive traffic. This is an absolute necessity because all devices are contaminated with web life. Though most of these virtual life forms are harmless. Immune systems or not, you do not want any of them on your private devices.
  • Power bank plus charging crank, an old but robust Nanotube capacitor battery with enough power to supply all components for a fortnight of typical consumer tasks: a mix of network research, media usage, game simulation, voice recognition, and text comprehension.
  • A 50-year-old mechanical one-hand keyboard as fallback for the gesture scanner. The keyboard has a modern net-thread adapter interface.
  • About 100 net-threads of different lengths, from 10 cm to 10 meters.
  • An improvised net-thread splicer without the usual integrated 3D printer. The splicer joins recycled connectors instead of printing new connectors directly onto threads.
  • Several 10 TB sticks, the standard for removable storage at the time. The sticks are small tubes, one centimeter long and two millimeters thick. They are just big enough to be handled easily. They are in fact network attached storage units integrated into a net-thread connector.