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Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

I seem to have learned this shit before there were (affordable) logic circuits. NAND was simply a transistor (or relay (or tube)) with punch of diodes pulling the gate or base down. We learned to use "Karnaugh Maps" to simplify the logic circutry to these bare NANDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map

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> before there were (affordable) logic circuits.

That would have been a good while ago. You didn't build digital stuff out of TTL on breadboards? Now that I'm typing this, I am getting a hint from the parenthetical "(or relay (or tube))" :)

edit: I was personally an innovator of the "WAS" gate. They're made of smoke.

There were American SN7400s in 1974 of course, but they were expensive compared to single transistors. I also remember the Finnish Parliament voting machine, made with transistors and relays around 1968. It was huge incomprehensible mess on hand-wired breadboards. It was easier to make totally new one with microprocessors and printed circuits.

What was a "WAS" gate? Google does not seem helpful here.

I'm going to assume that the WAS gate was a NAND...until the smoke got let out.