Computing

Computers come in a wide range of shapes and sizes within human society in the Calamity Multiverse, ranging from regular personal computers and smartphone-like PDAs to scientific quantum computers responsible for performing complex calculations. Most modern computers are built to prioritise reliability, modularity, upgradability and a long operational life over cost, convenience, form factor and weight. They empower individuals to repair their own hardware.

Hardware

In 2024, there was a revolutionary shift in hardware as graphene-based room-temperature superconductors (RTSCs) replaced silicon in most microprocessors, allowing for increased densities and faster clock speeds. Minimal Instruction Set Architecture (MISA), a reduced instruction set similar to RISC-V, became the dominant architecture and simplified processor design.

Additionally, a new design paradigm began to take hold during the middle of the century, which relied more heavily on the use of thin clients in corporate or government environments. This expanded to individuals too, where homes would include a dedicated central server from which computing clients could connect to remotely to access shared workspaces.

Modern computers are very coprocessor-heavy, reflecting the advantages of hardware acceleration on tight power budgets. Computers include coprocessors for encryption, networking, graphics processing, quantum computing, image processing, audio processing, matrix multiplication, physics simulation, and for performing calculations based on inputs from system sensors. Modern computers also incorporate ergonomic accommodations for anthros, such as keyboard options that are designed for use with claws.

Software

There are a number of differences to the real-world timeline of computing, which began to diverge in the 2000s. Instead of Windows establishing its dominance, it instead died out in favour of Unix-like operating systems, which assumed the majority of the market share. Many corporations developed their own heavily modified and proprietary distributions, such as Küiser Laboratories' OpenBSD-based RealityOS, contributing their improvements back to upstream codebases.

In the early 2020s, a large shift in software began to take place, as Krypton, a Rust-like compiled and borrow-checked language, almost completely killed off interpreted languages. At the same time, Linux was almost completely rewritten in Krypton and changed form dramatically, assuming a real-time microkernel model.