Any old school computer builders here?
- Thread starter raggie33
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The first computer I built was a Southwest Technical Products 6800, back when you had to build your own memory cards and the big new thing was 4KB on a single card. Used it partly for making crappy electronic music but one of our friends was into video special effects so we ended up putting together a computer controlled video processing studio.
Second computer we built used a TI9900 (if I remember correctly), a 16-bit processor with hardware multiply and divide... that more or less became the geometry engine for the third system, which was an array of 24 6502's each doing rendering for a portion of the screen. We actually got it working, although it was a painful lesson in how reliability goes down as you add more components to a system. It was probably not too different from keeping an old vacuum tube computer running, although our problem was connectors rather than tubes.
I ran across a couple of YouTube videos recently showing off relay computers that people had built, and I have a growing urge to build one of those. Downside is that clock speed is on the order of a few Hz, and the voices in my head are saying that it would be a lot easier to just write a simulator instead of actually building one, but what can you do ?
Second computer we built used a TI9900 (if I remember correctly), a 16-bit processor with hardware multiply and divide... that more or less became the geometry engine for the third system, which was an array of 24 6502's each doing rendering for a portion of the screen. We actually got it working, although it was a painful lesson in how reliability goes down as you add more components to a system. It was probably not too different from keeping an old vacuum tube computer running, although our problem was connectors rather than tubes.
I ran across a couple of YouTube videos recently showing off relay computers that people had built, and I have a growing urge to build one of those. Downside is that clock speed is on the order of a few Hz, and the voices in my head are saying that it would be a lot easier to just write a simulator instead of actually building one, but what can you do ?
I was looking into building the "Paperclip Computer" until I read through the book and found it's not an *automatic* computer. The human has to manually actuate switches to transfer the program code into "memory" and control all the functions. Rather than a computer, it's a device to show the most basic functions of a simple electronic computer and by having the human operator get literally hands on with every step, teaches how a computer works.
So how about a Paperclip Automatic Computer that uses relays to move the switches and other methods of electromechanical motion? the book details building *every part* (except the incandescent light bulbs) from scratch, including Binary Coded Decimal rotary switches.
Imagine wrapping the punched paper program sheet around the metal coffee can then poking a button and watching the can turn step by step to load the program into memory, which instead of a grid of manually operated twisted paperclip switches is a grid of relays, and so on from there.
How much complexity would have to be added to achieve the same computing result?
It absolutely is. But, the market for content creation and AI dev are huge, and drive the demand for these crazy big and hot chips. The costs of low-level components going up has also been drying up the market for good cheaper GPUs (AMD's, FI, are basically overclocked laptop GPUs, and Nvidia just keeps selling older series lower-end GPUs).
