World War III Preliminaries

America and it's people are like a box of fresh, clean furry puppies sitting right in the median of a four lane superhighway and an 18 wheel tractor trailer with brake failure careening straight out of control at them.

As Nyquist says it, as obvious as the nose on a man's face, The American people are completely without defense of any kind against Russia and China.

Imagine apocalyptic thermonuclear war waged on the United States during a nationwide mega-depression in the middle of a new Ice Age descending on countries that rely on heating oil to survive winter. Wait, there is more. Try to conceive of all this taking place over resource conflicts in an era of famine and scarcity, used as an excuse by governments to enforce economic tyranny and turn their own people into impoverished feudal serfs.

At Vault-Co we call it the Apocalypse Trifecta. Decline of the West - Resource Conflicts - Changing Climate. Three points triangulating Western civilization that will utterly destroy it.

The violence in the U.S. is only beginning. This is merely the snack bar advertisement before the newsreel and then the main feature. With the inside ripped to pieces by ethnic conflicts, try to then visualize a massive surprise attack on the cities which lack even the most basic civil defense education or preparations. It would send North America back to the neolithic.

If God is "love," then why would he pour out this cup of wrath on you? Maybe God is first and foremost to be feared. You should be thankful in trembling and modest gratitude for what little mercy is extended to you. God is not to be mocked. Just watch and you'll see. Remember, even if God didn't exist, the resulting humility from this perspective would be an enormous assistance in surviving times like these. A truly good secular thinker would be able to understand why.

We have not even come close to the hard spot yet. The Maunder Minimum approaches.

Possible trigger event during the next year or so.

ITZ COMING. PACK YOUR RICE.

Shelter Fitness : The King of Portable Gyms

What if I told you there was a serious, productive portable home gym exactly one meter long that was built so solid (only two moving parts) that it still functions as-new nearly 35 years after it was made? What if I told you there were 300 different exercises you could do with it that would work nearly every single muscle in your body, usually inside a 1x1 meter square of exercise floor? What if I then told you that there was hardly a charity shop in the world that didn't have one of these sitting around for $5.00 or best offer, possibly the most discarded piece of home gym equipment in the history of the world?

Every shelter should have at least one bullworker. I've bought five in the past year.

No, it's not as good as a fully stocked home gym with free weights. In fact it's only about 50% as good. Fortunately, that's still 50% more than most any other piece of equipment you could stock your shelter with.

Twenty minutes a day on the generator bike, fifteen with a bullworker and you will stay relatively fit in shelter during long term habitation. Don't close the vault door without one.

2008 Is Going To Be Our Best Year

We've got so many different projects finally coming to fruition at the same time here at Vault-Co and chances are they will all be complete about the middle of this year. It is truly going to be legendary. Keep watching this website for the most exciting and interesting stuff you have ever seen for civil defense.

Death Watch For Earth

Switching grain production to produce biofuels turned out to be one extremely stupid move. As it turns out, the world was on the brink of a massive series of crop failures.

Russians not stupid - they know who that missile shield is for

It's a new arms race with a very short course to WW3 this time

Death Watch For America

Babies, the other white meat.

Just as in 1918 during the Great War, the troops are bringing home diseases they don't even have names for. Numerous bacterial scourges are sweeping the U.S., presaging the coming epidemic(s).

The practice of writing bad checks in America to cover tomorrow's expenses is about to come to a screeching halt.

Posse Comitatus - U.S. troops being prepared to enforce martial law this year

No sooner had they declared empire than the U.S. began to fade away from history

The strangely prophetic Onion satire nearly 8 years ago

Death Watch For Britain

The last thin straw supporting that multikult Tower of Babel is the economy. If that falls, it will be nothing but car fires and riots as far as the eye can see.

Remember back in 2003 when Vault-Co predicted Sharia law for Britain within ten years?

Impossible. That Vault-Co guy must be some kind of nut. Fifty years, maybe. Ten years? That is something that just couldn't happen.

"Medieval society" is optimistic. Things were never this bad in Britain during the Dark Ages.

Look at the comments beneath the article. Multiculturalism sucks the life and convictions out of people the way a vampire drains blood. It reduces men to lily livered whiners barely more than females themselves. All the fight just oozes right out of them.

It's Not The Earth That Needs Protecting

Yawn, goes the earth ... what are those hairless monkeys in manpants jabbering about now?

Same old Ice Age, right on time, Maunder Minimum, as expected. Same old cull of jabbering chimps who are long on jabbering and short on thinking.

99% of all the species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct today. This planet sees'em come and go, all of them flourishing in their day and then fading when they fail to adapt to her natural cycles or they just don't want it badly enough anymore. It's all water under the bridge with her. She has seen the sturdy Neaderthal, the robust Cro-Magnon. All of them faded away and perished. Modern man is doing more jabbering and less thinking than any of those long dead branches nowadays, with a predictable outcome.

Vault Operating System : Some Field Notes

I'm going to list some of the basic requirements for the features to be present in the Vault OS V1.0 running on an XT compatible machine, let's say 512K RAM at startup, we'll assume no fixed media other than a floppy drive, monochrome display EGA, no battery, a single Ethernet card of some kind. This is about as elementary as you can get. You can find laptops like this thrown out in the garbage or at a garage sale for a few dollars. Most of the time, the clock battery will have to be present in order to maintain your BIOS setup, but keeping laptop batteries maintained is a real pain, so pull it out and we'll say that 12 volt laptop converters power all the machines off the common shelter voltage.

This will not include fixed media storage of database and configuration files. We'll leave this to specify later.

VAULT OS V1.0 BASIC FEATURE LIST :

1. Connected to a multiuser, multinode LAN Ethernet
2. Inventory management (with specific filtering for things like "due for rotation")
3. Personnel Data (including contact information, skill set and notes)
4. Medical Data (Listing basic medical info and ordinal sets of data like radiation exposure)
5. Scheduler (calendar for given week, month & year)
6. Job manager (linked to schedule, define tasks, periodicity, specifics)
7. Diagrams (maps, floorplans, locators, technical graphics)
8. Peer-To-Peer Communications (alerts, email and realtime chat with other terminals)
9. Sensors (Display of states and detectors ... hatch open, temp, water levels, batteries, etc.)
10. Controllers (Turn stuff on and off, like lights, fans, antenna riser, water pump, genset)
11. Logger (track all history and operations with review available, possible manual entries)

We'll assume a small embedded device connected to the Ethernet handles all the hard work collating and dispatching sensor information in a true multithreaded system. So something like the "Vault-Pad" I have a prototype running for would take in all kinds of sensor feeds, either analog, digital, switches ... then package this up as an Ethernet message "to whom it may concern" at regular intervals and send it out. This hardy and reliable device runs all the time, whereas any given terminal running the Vault OS can be on or off, working or broken. Although this small device schedules and controls devices automatically like air conditioning or fans, it could also be sent messages over Ethernet as overrides, like "turn on the fans now irregardless of temperature" and other control messages. It might be possible to write a PC compatible program that turns any PC into this "Vault-Pad" by configuring it correctly and using the standard interface ports (or A/D interface cards) to read in data and control devices.

If the small embedded workhorse called the "Vault-Pad" runs 24/7, then we could postulate a central server for the database (we'll say it's a very simple ISAM database) we'll call the "ThinkBoy" that serves up data from the central base and dispatches it at request. This "server" could also "think" about the ramifications of the data, like telling people that water levels are low and calculations show that with the water demands of 8 people, the water will run out in six months. In my case I'll probably use my military embedded PC board. In any other installation it might run off a decent quality 200mhz 486 portable with a hard drive. Any terminal can talk to "ThinkBoy" by name and request database information including conclusions about things like food and water, medical supplies and aboveground radiation hazards. It would be good if a single configuration switch in the Vault OS .ini file could tell a terminal (if it has the correct capacity) to take over for the Thinkboy until it comes online again. So any terminal could operate as the server if needed. This might be as simple as diagnosing the server as faulty, pulling out it's "brain" (a compact flash memory card) and then plugging it into a terminal and configuring it to become the "Thinkboy" the next time it boots up.

The population of sensor data will be looked for circulating on the Ethernet but this won't stop anything else from working. Sensor data could consist of anything we can hook up to the "Vault-Pad" via serial, parallel, I2C or other device communication protocol. If sensor data is empty for a terminal (no recent Ethernet messages) the last timestamp of sensor data is available in the sensor monitoring screen.

What kind of maintenance would ensue if a terminal failed? Go find another cheap, zero grade junk laptop or other machine, pull the "brain" (flash card) out of the defective terminal and plug it into the new one. Minimalist Ethernet installation with the OS configuring simple check for availability when the program starts.

The design goal would be a mini-internet inside the shelter which could consist of one or a thousand terminals, all with fairly similar capabilities.

Any feedback greatly appreciated. I am really trying hard to hammer out most of these details before I start work on the new version. I will have time in coming months to work on this regularly at night so I plan to get this working as soon as possible, for my own use initially and then anybody else who wants it. I'm not going to try to make any money off this operating system, it will absolutely be freeware when I have it running inside my own shelter.

EDIT : Arachne Web Browser, 16 Bit DOS HTML Browser Desktop ... could this be the base client operating system for a WATT-32 16 bit TCP/IP local network?

Vault-Co Operating System : Laptop, 386SX+,512K RAM

I bought four working monochrome laptops today, 2 486 DX machines and 2 386SX, for $40.00 and a handshake. In addition I got 3 PCMCIA Ethernet cards, 2 4MB RAM PCMCIA memcards, a PCMCIA CD-ROM reader portable unit and a PCMCIA Data/Fax Modem for another ten bucks. The seller threw in two portable Canon printers (battery powered where desired) and an Ethernet power hub panel for free. I got a docking station for one of the Canon 486DX laptops, in addition this machine has a printer built-in to the side! I am not sure if I will be able to get a printer cartridge for it, have to look around.

So my hardware for the OS is pretty straightened out. Several things are clear in my mind:

1. This OS should not run in Windows, not even Win 3.1 because of speed, performance and reliability issues. It was probably a mistake for me to spend so much time working on my prior version of CD Commander in Borland C++ Builder for a target W95-98 platform. Windows is crap for anything real-time and anything that has to perform well without fail. It also runs like a dog even on a modern machine, much less an old laptop.

2. To really take advantage of the hardware, the application has to run in 32 bit protected mode, whatever it is. I still have my entire WATCOM C++ development environment with the Sci-Tech VESA libraries if it comes to that.

3. It's a good idea to aim really low in terms of onboard memory requirements, to make it run on anything. The problem with Linux is that it is not really practical with less than 80 MB of storage available and even that is too ambitious. I need to write something that will work in what were once considered to be tiny RAM machines of as little as 4 MB storage either as a Flash card or in memory from some other resource plugged in.

4. In order to appeal to everybody everywhere, I have to write a Vault Operating System that can be implemented and used by nearly everybody everywhere on zero budget junk hardware that they can beg-borrow-steal. The more modest the better. Maybe I should be aiming for XT specifications, 512K RAM + DOS as a basis for something like VBDOS. It's no good writing a fantastic multiuser networked system if it requires $10,000 upfront and every terminal has to be a 1 GHX Win XP machine running on 4 gigs of RAM. People have better things to spend their prep money on. On the other hand, if it's cheap/simple/easily maintained and implemented, it could become ubiquitous.

5. There's an incredible amount of free dos software out there, including things like audio inputs for Sound Blaster you can hook up the headset/speaker jack for a CD-715 to in order to generate bargraphs of radiation counts. That's just one example of the sort of bargain basement ingenuity you can use running DOS programs. If you can make do with character graphic displays it gets even better.

Again, Visual Basic for DOS looks good with these requirements. The problem is that it only runs in real mode and that leaves a lot of memory wasted. Even EMS and XMS don't allow the programmer to take advantage of the power of protected mode that is available.