For story purposes, can someone build their own smartphone, computers, and OS from scratch?

Well, I have a character who built his own computer, with spare parts form his genius mother. And he also built a self-aware system, super computer faster than k-9 with the help of international experts in DNA, coding, packing, data packets, at Caltech. So sure, it can be done.

Peace, Tex

 

Well...but...that's fiction, if I understand the word "character." So it doesn't really feel like evidence. Unless your point is that you can write about it, not that you can actually do it.

Also, he started with parts. It's still not entirely clear, but it appears that the original question assumes that the parts don't already exist. So it's not a matter of plugging some chips into a circuit board; neither the chips OR the circuit board exist. I'm not even sure if electricity exists.

Edited to add: Were you joking and I didn't get it? I'm suddenly fairly sure that you were joking and I didn't get it.

 

Will someone do this already so this discussion will be solved? I mean, those of you who are convinced that it can be done -- well, do it! Otherwise, there will be a thousand answers and two hundred separate arguments, two of which will divert into politics and one about raping donkeys, and with every answer save one from an actual expert who will be ignored by all.

 

Yes, of course. But technically you could do it. Take years to do complete though.

 

Of course it's fiction. The kidding was that one can't do it alone or without the parts. One can't fabricate a CPU from pasta. Peace, Tex

 

In the old days, when a few components served similar functions in different pieces of electronics, you could cannabilize from one to make something. My teenage years were spent hauling away the carcasses of TVs and old radios from TV/Radio repair shops. I would unsolder everything, strip them of transformers, tube sockets, tuning capacitors, IF cans, volume controls, terminal strips, and individual resistors and capacitors. Everything got filed in the appropriate cigar box, to be resurrected as some piece of ham equipment eventually. If I got lucky, there might be some tubes in there and a quick check with an ohmmeter on pins 2 and 6 of the old octal sockets would tell me if the filament was good, and if so the tube probably was OK. A 6L6 used in the audio output stage also made a pretty good 10W RF amplifier.

However, now the components are highly specialized and almost not interchangeable. The documentation on the device will be unavailable. Not even I would attempt that. And it depends on an infrastructure that would also have to be recreated. If you are thinking of an apocalyptic scenario in which you are trying to restore cell phones... guess what, you are probably much more concerned with where you next meal is coming from, than unsoldering an SMT device with a soldering iron... oh yes, where are you going to plug the soldering iron in?

 

Hi,

I'm going to agree with Lew here. If we look at the OP's question in terms of starting from scratch, it may be theoretically possible to build these things - but it's about as likely as a person suffocating to death in a room full of air because all the air molecules by chance have decided to stay on the other side of the room. So for all intents and purposes - no.

But, if you wave some magic pixie dust around? Maybe.

A more practical approach would be to ask instead, what could someone - a group of someones - all very bright and educated in technology etc, be able to build. For example give me the blue prints and raw materials and I still couldn't make a modern car. But I could, assuming I knew some basic ironwork, welding etc and had a forge etc, make a steam powered vehicle. Would that then be enough to achieve whatever it is the OP wants? Remember old loco's used to be able to run on tracks at seventy miles an hour hauling massive loads. Would it be that hard to make a steam car that can do something similar? And would that be enough to achieve the plot of the book?

And as Lew said - cell phones are out. You need to build an entire infrastructure - towers, satellites etc, just to run your phones. Thats a pointlessly difficult thing to do. And then you need to build the factories to manufacture your components. But a simple ham radion? Not so tough. So the question becomes, will a ham radio do? What is it that you need the communication system to be able to do?

Back to you Pens I'm afraid.

Cheers, Greg.

 

I like the point made in these two replies. Going back to what I said earlier, I could make this a futuristic story in it's own fictional universe (assuming all the laws of physics and science apply to this universe as they do in ours) then what if they discovered some way of creating cell phones transmissions that didn't require the use of large infrastructures like towers and satellites. Remember phones use to be clunky landlines and cell phones were far from society's mind. Now cell phones are the norm and landlines are around but slowly fading away. I wonder if as technology progresses maybe the way our cell phones and computers operate will change or be easier to produce. Could a fictional futuristic universe (separate from our own) hypothetically discover a way to transfer cell phone signals over smaller infrastructures? Didn't computers use to be the size of whole rooms? Now you can fit one in your pocket.

 

But that would still require technology. I get the impression that you're starting out with, say, mud and weeds.

What are you starting out with?

 

You could do that in ours, if needed. All we need is for some scientist to discover a new force(s) or a way of manipulating a current force(s).

Yes. And that's a continuing trend. Engineers are figuring out ways to stack processor cores on top of each other. The tricky part is making them stable and cool enough so they don't fry. There was also a idea for a 12.8 million gigabyte hard drive the size of a cubic centimeter. They reported that they needed to find a way to pack wires densely enough. And then there was a university that made a processor run at about 500GHz. Though, they had to use frozen nitrogen, if memory serves.

 

Hi Pens,

Actually you could do that now. It wouldn't be easy but there's no reason why you couldn't instead of having large cell towers, have much smaller ones but a lot more of them. The problem is that it's still infrastructure and you have to have it given our current level of tech. If you want to go future tech - basically the fantasy equivalent of pixie dust - then you can pretty much do what you want. One way would be to have nanobots able to self reproduce and manufacture components / phones out of anything. But if you have that then your OP becomes redundant. You aren't manufacturing anything out of scratch.

But my thought, not knowing your scenario is go back to the basics. Ask yourself, what do you need for your plot to work? Do you actually need a cell phone? Or do you you rather need a means of communication over distance? And why does it need to be of some radically different design / architecture to what currently exists? If it's about non communication between systems would encryption do the same thing?

Break down your plot needs to not equipment but rather functional requirements. Then see if something else will do. Think outside the box as they say.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Sounds like pixie dust to me!

Defining functional (rather than technical) requirements is the key to successful engineering!

 

Do not think a lone person could make advanced hardware in his basement shop. But they may be able to design one and farm the components out to existing industry and do the final assembly themselves. If a Chinese factory got the specifications for a new touch screen and all the paperwork was in order and bribes paid on time I bet it would get built.

Software is different, it is very conceivable that someone could write an OS on there own, it may take a while but doable

 

OS yes, hardware no. You need a factory to make that stuff.