OT: From Nand to Tetris MOOC
Might be of interest to the list: I just finished reading "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson about the early days of digital computers (and a very cool account of the first cellular automaton running in 5K memory!) and - looking for more information about Boolean algebra and logic - came across this free online course that builds a virtual machine from first principles ... https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer http://nand2tetris.org/ Next session starts March 28. -- (o< .: Per curiositas ad astra .: http://www.circuidipity.com (/)_
On 03/21/2016 04:33 PM, Daniel Wayne Armstrong wrote:
Might be of interest to the list: I just finished reading "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson about the early days of digital computers (and a very cool account of the first cellular automaton running in 5K memory!) and - looking for more information about Boolean algebra and logic - came across this free online course that builds a virtual machine from first principles ...
https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer http://nand2tetris.org/
Next session starts March 28.
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. -- Alvin Starr || voice: (905)513-7688 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin@netvel.net ||
| 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. 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. You, the operator, must execute the program. And choose the memory locations. And load or store values. Etc. (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.)
| 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 ||
On 2016-03-21 04:33 PM, Daniel Wayne Armstrong wrote:
Might be of interest to the list: I just finished reading "Turing's Cathedral" by George Dyson about the early days of digital computers
I liked the bit where they couldn't get the technical powerhouse of RCA to get the promised Selectron thermionic memory devices working, so they had to revert to Williams tubes. These had been running successfully in British computers since the mid-1940s. As with most early computing, seemingly the main difficulty was keeping the whole system cool while being able to discern signal from noise. That, and vermin control. The IAS computer is definitely a better first computer to look at than the first stored programme digital computer, the Manchester SSEM (“Baby”). It had 7 instructions, could only subtract, and had one crude conditional. It takes real dedication to do anything useful with such a sparse instruction set. Still, people have implemented Baby emulators on pretty much everything — including the microcontroller scavenged from a low-energy lightbulb. cheers, Stewart
On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 09:38:31AM -0400, Stewart C. Russell wrote:
I liked the bit where they couldn't get the technical powerhouse of RCA to get the promised Selectron thermionic memory devices working, so they had to revert to Williams tubes. These had been running successfully in British computers since the mid-1940s. As with most early computing, seemingly the main difficulty was keeping the whole system cool while being able to discern signal from noise. That, and vermin control.
The IAS computer is definitely a better first computer to look at than the first stored programme digital computer, the Manchester SSEM (“Baby”). It had 7 instructions, could only subtract, and had one crude conditional. It takes real dedication to do anything useful with such a sparse instruction set. Still, people have implemented Baby emulators on pretty much everything — including the microcontroller scavenged from a low-energy lightbulb.
You only need one instruction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer That will do it all. It's awful to program though and certainly not efficient. -- Len Sorensen
participants (5)
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Alvin Starr -
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
Daniel Wayne Armstrong -
Lennart Sorensen -
Stewart C. Russell