Coloring computers: non-electronic computers that work when you color them | Hacker News Reader

Coloring computers: non-electronic computers that work when you color them

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244 pointstodsacerdoti33 comments

The Dutch childrens magazine Donald Duck included a DIY cardboard 3 bit computer in four editions in 1980. It was powered by a marble and gravity and it included QA cards, like “What shall we eat? followed by three questions (hungry? Want sweet? etc) and then on the back of the cards there were eight answers. You set the switches to left or right, put in the marble at the top and looked up the answer corresponding to the place where the marble appeared.

I was seven years old and at that moment I decided I wanted to become a computer scientist. It determined my life.

http://rene.steetskamp.nl/2015/04/

The DigiComp I did it for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I

That is very cool, a bit of Google Foo then gave me this:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-V14n0_048hOUR1Ymdv...

That and Google Translate will allow you to build your own.

Recently a friend showed me this, which I thought was pretty nifty: CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation)

"Back in the 1960's and early 70's Bell Labs made some very sophisticated educational kits available to high schools and colleges. Designed for classroom use, they included wonderful manuals written by some of Bell Labs best minds. One of these kits, introduced in 1968, was CARDIAC: A CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation."

https://www.mikesmakes.ca/1960s/cardiac

Reminds me of Turing Tumble, marble powered computers (https://upperstory.com/turingtumble/). My 8 year old got one for his birthday and it's one of the very few toys he actually likes better than screen time!

I assume that the kind of things you make when coloring are very similar to the marble computers, the rules of the Tumble components would translate very close to the coloring rules, I think.

This made me imagine an educational toy that allows you to make working simple circuits by drawing: You draw with markers that have electrically conductive ink, then touch the contacts of a 9-volt battery to your drawing at a certain point and a bulb or LED that you've taped to your drawing lights up. Maybe you'd supply prefabricated stickers that contain logic gates that you stick to the paper where you need a gate.

It is something there have been around for a few years: https://interestingengineering.com/what-is-conductive-ink-te...

As the other comment mentions, this is a thing already, but thanks for bringing it up. I'd completely forgotten about it and it seems like a good hands-on way to get a better understanding of circuits.

I used to do this with a graphite pencil, battery, simple 1 transistor amplifier, and a piezo buzzer.

Lots of fun. Makes me yearn for the days of radio shack.

I picked up exactly that at a maker-faire type event a few years back. Might have been this product [1] or something similar.

  [1] https://www.lillepunkin.com/2016/12/2016-hot-holiday-gift-guide-day-13.html

This reminds me of DynamicLand [0] where Bret Victor [1] was (is?) involved. Looked very exciting but I don't know if that project is still active.

[0] https://dynamicland.org/

[1] http://worrydream.com/

Was going to say the same. Is there any open source project that aids in building these types of interfaces? Do these images just transcribe to regular languages? How does this all work?

I love the idea, but the instructions could be improved. There are a few places where I can imagine kids might get confused or lost.

It's too general/abstract. Instead of a square color and circle color, just pick two colors and go with it.

I guess the reason for that is making the instructions understandable even if printing in b/w.

I think that's correct. If I were to do it for my kids I'd probably whip through and colour in the squares and circles beforehand to make it simpler for them

Also it works with colorblind people. This way they can choose the color combination that works for them.

I think it's just so you can choose two colors that you have and fill in the instructions.

It’s cute but it just makes me miss the days where kids could go to the library and load up Rocky’s Boots on an Apple ][. That’s how I learned logic gates and it stuck.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots

These days that library can be found here: https://archive.org/details/Rockys_Boots_1982_Learning_Compa...

And even better in my opinion is the sequel Robot Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey

There's a disk image at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/msdos_Robot_Odyssey_1985

And even a re-implementation for browsers https://robotodyssey.online/

A much smaller in scope but pretty fun introductory game: https://echa.itch.io/pocket-robots-test-chamber

I don’t know if using a single logic gate really helps in getting across the logic behind computer circuits

That's entirely the point. A NOR gate is functionally complete: you can build any logic gate out of just NOR gates.

You can, but then I don’t see the point of making it a colouring book.

Probably because it's easier to have to know only one rule.

But... they got a character named "nory", having another character named "andy" could be fitting!

The links under the “links” heading don’t work¹. Is the author lost & is this why it was put on IPFS?

¹I checked the TOR one, and eccs.world w/o the prefix, but the dat:// is unknown to me

Lost? I don’t know about others, but I often push things onto IPFS when I want to share static content with people.

I didn't even notice that it was hosted on ipfs until I saw the url

I love this

Ah, the title is truncated

non-electronic computers that work when you color them according to a simple set of rules.

I thought it was like art deco but art acco

Submitted title was "Coloring computers: non-electronic computers that work when you color them acco". We've lopped off the end bit above.

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