Alright so the CIA or your choice of any local three-letter agency is probably going to lynch us for discussing this kind of technology, but I've been looking into hardware components which I think are being under-utilised. What kinds of components? The sorts that could be used to do general desktop computing without bowing down to the Electric Jew. With some of these concepts put together, you could probably shitpost on 8ch with a hand-crank powered computer. Here are my findings:
Non-volatile RAM:
en.wikipedia.org
RAM which can store memory without persistent power. An SSD can be utilised as NVRAM, but there's been other methods to try to implement this. With an ideal implementation, powering off your computer would be equivalent to putting it in a hibernation mode.
e-Paper:
en.wikipedia.org
You probably associate this with e-Readers, and therefore annoying harry potter-reading single mothers but the truth is, these things are incredible. If it weren't for the costs associated with the other hardware of an e-reader, they could stay charged indefinitely. As you know, the thing which sets it apart from other low-power displays used in calculators and the like are viewing angle, and the fact that rather than blanking out when the power is cut, they have to actually wipe themselves clean. The refresh rate is terrible though, so this will be pretty grating with conventional, line-by-line text processing.
Etch-a-Sketch:
youtube.com
youtube.com
Power Over Ethernet:
en.wikipedia.org
I'll admit this is cheating, but for most interesting tasks involving a computer, you'll need networking anyway.
If the requirements of having an Ethernet port at all are too steep, then we could scrap this and build a modem into the computer instead. If we do this, we have to account for the electricity the external phone uses as well.
Human Power:
en.wikipedia.org
k-tor.com
I alluded to this earlier, and you might've taken it as shitposting. Just read the sales pitch, and you'll see that it's more than enough to power the kind of computer we're looking at.
Plug Computer Form Factor:
en.wikipedia.org
Doesn't exactly align with the objective, since you can't really just power them off at will, but their low wattage (generally lower than the Commodore 64, apparently) still makes them useful if you need a computer that's active 24/7. You could use it for to run a bittorrent program, and maybe a web server I guess.
The ideal goal is to have a computer that consumes 0 watts in an idle state (idle meaning, any time you're busy reading text for more than ~4 seconds), and still a negligble amount of power when it's actually being used. This would mean that the computer is actually powered "off" for most of the time it's in use.
Is there anything stopping this from happening? I don't know whether you can just stop and start CPUs the same way you can with the RAM/monitor.