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Comment by meditative | Hacker News Reader

There's no remote monitoring, they're more complex and expensive. You need either multiple compressors, or run long stretches of hose/pipe.

They're super cool and rewarding to work with, everything feels like steam punk, but there's no real practical reason to keep them there. The electronic stuff is _very_ reliable when installed correctly and quality parts are used, much like the pneumatic systems.

The only place that _might_ make sense to leave them in a little longer is inside a hazardous environment, which requires detailed certification for installed electrical equipment.

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Since a bad solar flare could mess up our electronic stuff we should at least keep the equipment we need to rebuild society not sensitive to EMP.

Still easier to shield existing digital gear for EMP. Compared to the cost when one inevitably does hit the shielding is dirt cheap.

You should test that shielding though, and AFAIK the dangerous voltage enters equipment through cables. Unless everything is fiber optics you would need some chonky optocouplers on all signal paths.

Pneumatic air is usually supplied with plastic tube and hose. There are no unexpected electrical circuits coupling to unrelated equipment.

it will no doubt damage a lot of equipment, it's still cheaper to replace everything than to have incompatible spare pneumatic gear laying around.

I think the problem is one of bootstrapping. With PLCs controlling even sewage pumps society will have a lot of more important things to do before we come around to fixing elevators, automatic doors, or even chip fabs. Then there are herds of forgotten VAXen and AS400s that have been chugging along for decades running who knows what mission critical code, all gone without as much as specs remaining.

The less basic infrastructure which is wiped out the faster we can rebuild. Right now it looks like we will be falling back to whatever cam-actuated automatic lathes which have not been sold below scrap value that are left. And I hear those things are a bitch to set up.

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