Harry Porter’s Relay Computer
Ever since taking Digital Logic Design in my freshman year of college, I’ve toyed with computer hardware and processor design. Harry Porter has taken my idle thoughts and built them into a reality. He has made an electromechanical computer just about entirely out of relays.
Like its ancestors, the machine has virtually no processing power by today’s standards, yet consumes wall space (and most likely electricity) almost beyond measure.
January 14, 2009 at 9:00 am
The coolest part of this is that it really reveals the level of complexity needed to process basic functions. I see this and imagine how much is crammed onto a quad core chip that’s smaller than a playing card.
January 14, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Right–for all of the work, space and energy, this computer is pretty limited in what it can do. It also manages to be a tinker’s dream. If there’s a problem with your computer, reach in and fix it!
I’ve been reading Steven Levy’s Hackers and it describes one MIT student adding new machine opcodes by physically adding new circuits to the processor! Not that I ever need to do that, but it’s just impossible in the day of VLSI and chip fabrication plants.