On 03/22/2016 03:37 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote: > | From: Alvin Starr <[email protected]> > > | 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... 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 [email protected] || --- Talk Mailing List [email protected] https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
