A Do-It-Yourself paper digital computer (1959)

longstreet.typepad.com

59 points·ColinWright··8 comments

Reminds me of the Digicomp 1!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I

If I had found one of those when I was a kid I would have been in heaven.

What I did have was a CARDIAC [0] computer. I found it when I was 10 (this would have been in the early 1970s) and it turned me on to programming. I still have it, although some memory cells are burned out (too many erasures) and I tried building larger, more complicated variants with extended instruction sets.

[0] https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/museum/cardiac.html

I also had a CARDIAC, but on top of that I had a series of computers starting with KIM-1 (6502) and SDK-85 (8085, which was Intel's answer to the Z80 at the time). Fun times, and I think we've lost something since then.

Reminds me a lot of the marble calculator [0], though with far more moving (and fragile) parts.

[0] https://lapinozz.github.io/learning/2016/11/19/calculator-wi...

This kind of computer might be just what we need for a Venus rover

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6933

Electronics are still more likely I think.

Some sources claim [1] that even in the 1980s the Venera program had developed circuits capable of working outside of the probe's pressure hull, at Venus temperatures. I don't remember ever seeing any details on that. If I would have to guess, it was vacuum tube technology.

For future probes, silicon-carbide semiconductors seem promising. Some proof-of-concept electronic instruments working at 500 C have been published in recent times [2].

[1] http://mentallandscape.com/V_Venera11.htm

[2] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012LPI....43.1259H/abstra...

looks like the octave key mechanism on a woodwind.

wow!

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