I remember part of a book, "Souls in the Great Machine", on a post-apocalyptic fantasy Earth, where a "librarian" ran a computing device composed of hundreds of people working machinery together. She set up a duplicate computer to make sure the results always matched.
This idea is referenced quite a bit in an Asimov novel, but I can't remember the name. Something about earth in the far future, and called Eternity Circuits. Computers enforce physical arrangement at an atomic level, and redundancy circuits enforce the computer and each other, basically creating systems that last forever.
Neal Stephenson covered this in The Diamond Age. People formed a massively parallel computer that performed computations in their blood stream with nanites and shared data between hosts via "fluid transfers."
Kinda sci-fi, we're so close to a future where when/if original source code is lost, a mainframe runs in an emulator and the human operating it is also emulated.
I like Sci-Fi and sometimes I fantasize with a world where brains have become (non-self-conscious) processing power connected to a big terminal; with such a vast amount of analytic power that you can brute-force 100 billions of passwords in one second and where you can focus the abstract thinking (aka creativity) of all the brains into one specific problem; leading to a lot of new discoveries.
Idea for the sci-fi story: after the civilization collapse, the only computing device that has survived is an arcade machine, with a difficult game that accidentally is Turing complete. People need to program it, so they can use the results to reboot the power/transportation/medical equipment/etc.
I fantasize about computers too. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see.
Super-scratch. We'd have to trash every processor manufacturing plant on the planet; Every single one almost certainly uses computer-controlled machinery working from computer-stored plans.
This would be a fun novel to read. An alien intelligence that can only act at a distance infects our computer systems, and we have to recover. A sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, except without the magic "engines don't work, but matches do" flavor. I hope Neal Stephenson is bored and looking for something to write.
In the three body problem, a computer is created out of 30 million uneducated soldiers that stand in a 6x6km square communicating mostly through flags. 3 soldiers form AND or OR gates. A memory bus is run by cavalry.
I am only half way through the book, so this might not be THE alien computer from the book, but still fitting.
How are you proposing that tens of thousands of people around the globe working together on multi-billion-dollar projects perform their jobs effectively if all the information is stored on isolated machines?
Sounds like what has been around since the mainframe days and batch computing. Or maybe one could liken it to Star Trek, with ops being the people keeping the warp core going even when faced with borgs and black holes?
Does anyone have any good resources on how to design systems like these? I find the idea of computers that have to work for decades, be autonomous and self reparing really exciting.
Unfortunately, I think in the world you describe, you will be immersed in 100x more computers, they will just be smaller, and everywhere (possibly inside you).
Reminds me just a bit of the Culture series, where in the distant future computing power is essential infinite. In the series, many of the great AIs of unfathomable intellect spend their free time on the "Infinite Fun Space," which is simulating universes with slightly different starting conditions and physical laws.
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