William Forstchen - The Final Day

“There!” Ernie announced, pointing to a volt meter that surged to life once the chip was replaced. “It’s good to go. We can use it!”

John sighed. “I hate to do this, but can I ask what we can use that board for?”

The two looked up at him as if he was a peasant rudely interrupting a royal banquet.

“If we can just get some computers back online, it’s a huge step,” Ernie announced, still wearing his magnifying glasses, which gave him something of a crazed look when you were staring straight at him.

“For what purposes that we can use right now?” John asked, regretting that his query did sound somewhat blunt.

“All right, John, we’d better settle this priority right now,” Ernie replied sharply.

“I’m just asking where this can lead us, that’s all,” John said defensively. “You two are a couple of our most valuable resources. I just want to make sure we’re spending those resources wisely.”

“You suggesting I go out on woodcutting detail instead?” Ernie snapped.

“No, damn it.”

Paul stepped between the two and put his hands up in a soothing gesture. “John’s right, Ernie. We’re spending a lot of time on these old machines; there has to be a profit in it, and he has a right to know what we’re thinking about regarding all of this.”

“All right, then,” Ernie retorted. “God knows how many times when I was with IBM or contracted to NASA I’d be working on something and some damn project manager would come along, question its worth, and shelve it. IBM could have been years ahead of Apple and the whole PC revolution if people like me had been listened to.”

“Let me take this,” Paul said softly, sensing that Ernie was heating up.

“Fine,” Ernie snapped, “but if our supreme leader is here to tell us to shut this down, I’ll just hole up at home and keep at it myself. My family and I survived through the first year without the interference of others, and, John, you were damn glad to have us blocking the left flank on the day we fought the Posse.”

“Why don’t you three arguing fools come upstairs for some tea and talk it out up here?”

They looked back to where Becka stood at the base of the stairs, holding a teapot up as a peace offering.

John nodded a bit sheepishly and followed her back up to the sunlit warmth of the old library office. The twins were still asleep, so after gratefully accepting the herbal mint drink, John followed Paul out into the main area of the library. It was cold, but one corner of the vast room was sunlit and offered the comfort of overstuffed leather chairs. The three settled down.

“I know the machines we are working on look like toys,” Paul began. “Compared to what we had just before the war, they are toys, but in their day, they were cutting-edge technology and used as such. Funny that we never thought about it before. The vast majority of computers being tossed aside were not broken; it was just that advances were coming so rapidly. It’s not like old cars that got sold and resold until they finally just died. Most computers getting junked simply just had a hard drive cook off or motherboard going bad, but the rest of the unit was still good. They were just junked with no resale in mind because after three to four years, they were antiques. Moore’s law at work.”

“Refresh my memory, please,” John asked.

Ernie sighed as if asked a dumb question by someone who should know better.

Paul said, “Moore’s law, named after one of the founders of Intel back in the 1960s, postulated that computing power as defined by the number of transistors per square inch will double in a very rapid progression. It meant that computing power, speed of calculations, storage, all of it will increase at a geometric progression, while at the same time cost per unit such as a hard drive for example will plummet. That Apple IIe we first brought online had around 64K, not megabytes or gigabytes, but 64 kilobytes ’ worth of chips in it for around three thousand dollars of 1980s money. Eight years later, it was obsolete and thus wound up in the basement down here, and I bet in Black Mountain alone we could find a couple of hundred of them not plugged in on the day things hit the fan and therefore perhaps still viable. Imagine if we had two hundred of your old clinker Edsels. Unlike computers, they were run and resold until finally just junked. Not so with computers, and that is what has Ernie and me fired up. Your average five-hundred–dollar computer just before the war wiped out nearly everything that was hooked up online was equal to the military’s top Cray of a couple of decades earlier.”

“Therefore?” John pressed.

“That’s the whole interesting point that we all seemed to overlook,” Paul continued. “I remember the year the college purchased new laptops for every faculty and staff member. Great idea, but three years later, they were obsolete; five years later, they were in our junk pile or just tossed into a closet and forgotten. I remember seeing a whole Dumpster load of them, recalling when they cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars on delivery and five years later we couldn’t give them away, so we just tossed them out instead. There was no secondary market for five-, let alone eight- or ten-year-old computers. Files once stored on five-inch floppy disks or even reel-to-reel were transferred to three-and-a-half-inch disks, and then to just memory sticks, downloaded into the hard drive of your new machine and the old machines tossed. Those files are still alive, John. But we’ve got to dig up the hardware to read them again and then build off that.”

“Build what? I’m worried about having enough food and firewood to see us through the winter. Everyone is screaming for more electricity now that we’ve got something up and running again. Hey, I’d love to have a computer in my office, even an old green-screen machine hooked to a printer. I’m sick of my old Underwood typewriter with the dang F and J keys sticking half the time. But the time to get even one computer up and running, especially now?”

He pointed to the blowing snowdrifts outside the window, and a thought flashed of the young couple down in the park. He wondered if the cold had finally driven them back inside.

“It’s stuff we can use now. Databases, for one,” Paul replied. “We were lucky to find hard copies of all the IEEE journals from the nineteenth century so we could figure out how to start rebuilding, using the same designs Westinghouse, Tesla, and Edison did. It’d be nice to have all those millions of words in a searchable database. Even the library cataloging went online years ago, so we are no longer even sure what we have in the book stacks around us.”

“And that would help us…?” John let the question trail off.

“Okay, I agree,” Paul continued. “A computer working here, one in Asheville, another in Morganton… big deal other than the convenience of using writing machines we once took for granted. To talk with others? We already have some telephones up and running. Cell phones and Wi-Fi? Forget it for years to come, so yeah, I can see your point on that score. I agree; our more immediate concerns are firewood and food.”

“I’m not saying stop working on this,” John interjected. “It’s just that as of the moment, I’m not seeing the short-term benefits. We replicate computer technology of the 1980s, maybe the ’90s, and then what?”

“We eavesdrop,” Ernie said with a smile, acting at least somewhat nonconfrontational for a change, “like I said the other day when Paul showed you the first machine up and running. Come on, John, I’m talking about Bluemont. You’re ex-military. When you were in the Middle East, how did the White House and Pentagon micromanage every move you guys made?”