| From: Alvin Starr <alvin@netvel.net>
| Or you could try this | https://archive.org/details/howtobuildaworkingdigitalcomputer_jun67 | They has this book in my high-school library and it sort of got me hooked.
That book is pretty misleading. well...
On 03/22/2016 03:37 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote: the first computers looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer One could say that the first digital computer was a bad mathematician who needed to use his fingers. (please groan here) The thing I like about the book and the project is that it is something that is build-able in any number of homes without a whole lot of skill or tools. It teaches the fundamentals of boolean logic and how a modern computer is built but just a few million times smaller.
It produces a box with lights. And electric combinatorial circuits to do adding or subracting of 4-bit numbers (as far as I can tell). And switches for memory.
Well some of the first computers did not have much in the way of memory either. I do not believe that memory is a requirement for a computer but your point is valid its hard to think of a functional computer without memory.
You, the operator, must execute the program. And choose the memory locations. And load or store values. Etc.
Yep. Its not fast.
(In about 1963, I built very limited adder with similar technology. I even made the switches myself. Very crude. I kept asking adults "what is a computer?" because I didn't know if I'd built one. None of them had answers. How much easier this would have been if there had been the internet.)
Well if people like you did not build the crude switch based computers and then graduate to bigger and better computers, we would not have the internet. -- Alvin Starr || voice: (905)513-7688 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||