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Old 05-06-2012, 02:57 PM
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raketenjagdpanzer raketenjagdpanzer is offline
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Anything inside a fully-armored vehicle, not touching the hull, would probably survive due to the vehicle being basically a faraday cage.

Anyone stateside with a radio, TV, computer, etc. inside a steel shed with a grounding post, same thing. Or even a small radio (or laptop!) inside a cookie tin resting on a piece of paraffin, wood, foam-rubber etc. or otherwise insulated from the rest of the metal box.

There is a mention in Armies of the Night that an abandoned computer store has a few boxed-up, functional PCs in its back room, so we can assume the building's structure acted as a Faraday shield.

Believe it or not, if you tightly wrap a box (any material will do) in Cat-5 or 6 cable, it is EMP-shielded. Cat-5 cable insulation is designed to dampen electronic crosstalk, hence emission shielding.

Panasonic/Matsushita began making Toughbook laptops in 1991; however, as many computer parts come from Japan and Taiwan both of which are on China's doorstep, once the war in the Far East went hot I can imagine those becoming prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the federal Government; few if any would have made it into municipalities, and any that still exist post-1997 are either in the hands of local governments who don't know what to do with them or are in the hands of CivGov or MilGov.

I'd wager probably 99% or thereabouts of any "home" PCs are gone for good.

Any vehicles (M557, ships at port, etc.) that survived and have computers on board are invaluable.

Most data centers or backup data centers are EMP-hardened; when I worked for Star Systems, our fallback was Sungard in Philly but others exist (we later changed to a backup DC in Florida, one designed to survive 200mph winds, with two weeks of internal power at max capacity - all companies onboard and running full speed). So I think a good portion of commercial/enterprise computing would survive. But how would you get the people there to operate it? I know I wouldn't really be much interested in going in to work on Nov 25 1997 in the T2k universe truth be told.

The internet would of course survive - that's what its designed for. University data centers, depending on where they were, would keep going.

There's a ton of VAX/VMS machines in campus basements that would get dusted off and pressed back into service.

The Soviets would have these resources as well, just not as many. After the end of the cold war it was discovered that the Soviets had copies a few mini-frame and mainframe designs and where they could not accurately duplicate the precise parts, instead clean-room engineered analog copies. So you'd have some components made up of TTL logic and hand-wire-wrapped components and whatnot. Those would be particularly robust, although the Soviets would have exponentially fewer of them.
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