Obsolete Technology

It was 1975 and a spotty 15-year old boy was intently studying a photograph in a glossy magazine. Late at night and under the bed clothes with a torch, I couldn't sleep for thinking about running my hands over that curvaceous teletype, flipping those toggle switches and thrilling to the little red lights flickering on and off...



The magazine in question was Scientific American and the object of my lust was the IMSAI 8080. I never did get my hands on one - though I did my fair share of toggling bootstrap loaders into similar machines (mainly a PDP-8 with core memory and rather worn out front-panel switches.)

The Obsolete Technology site provides a fascinating journey through the first 18 years of personal computing. With lots of photos, information, specifications and old adverts that bring the memories come flooding back. I was amazed to find that I had owned or extensively used thirteen of the featured machines… and spent hours daydreaming about a lot more besides.

Slide Rule Universe

Slide Rule Universe has everything you every wanted to know about slide rules, even how to build your own… You did want to know about slide rules, didn’t you?

An amazing variety of slide rules are on sale in the catalog - fancy calculating the trajectory of a 105mm Howitzer shell, or computing flow parameters for hydraulic valves, then they have a slide rule for you.

Personally I’m still looking for a good set of Napier’s Bones - never seem to turn up on eBay for some reason.

Binary Adder Made of Wood and Marbles

Here’s a wooden binary adder that uses marbles for the bits. Be sure to watch the video demonstration - you only realise how clever the design is when you see it in action, especially as the carry bits cascade through the digits.

There’s plenty more to see on the rest of the site, including Marble Machine 2, an ingenious piece of kinetic art, and photography using a flatbed scanner.

War of the Worlds

Darkhorse.com have a wonderful comic version of "The War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells. They appear to have kept very close to the original text and I love their rendering of the Martians. Great stuff!

The comic does appear to have been slightly influenced by that Jeff Wayne chappy though - I'm sure that in the original the tripods called out "Ulla", rather than the more musical "Ooolaaa!"

K'NEX Computer

Lego, relays, wood and marbles… it was only a matter of time before somebody came up with a K’NEX computer. This 4-bit computer, ten feet tall and built of K’NEX, works in a similar way to other ball-based computers. Check out the links on the right of the page for some useful explanations.

Starship Dimensions

Starship Dimensions is a beautiful site that contains hundreds of scale drawings of Science-Fiction space craft - from Serenity to the Dyson Sphere. I hate to recommend using IE, but hitting the site with that browser allows you to pick up the ships and drag them around, making it easy to compare the relative sizes of Moya and Station V from 2001, for example.

A great site to just browse and marvel at the drawings, but also a priceless resource to help win those alcohol-fueled arguments over whether Godzilla would fit inside a Cardassian Keldon starship.

How to build NAND gates from Relays

Here's a nice simulation of various logic gates, adders, flipflops and multiplexers built from relays. Click on the inputs on the left to animate the circuits.

Homebrew Relay Computer

Following on from yesterday’s homebrew CPU link, here’s another stunning homebrew machine. But none of that fancy new 74 series stuff for Harry Porter, of Portland State University’s Computer Science Department - oh, no - he’s built his machine from 415 four-pole double throw relays.

Follow the ‘more information’ link and check out the movies and MP3 - they are worth it just for the sound of the machine in action.

Now where did I put that old box of Audions…

Sand Game - Anti-Productivity

Beware! This Sand Game Java applet can waste an awful lot of your time. It’s really a toy rather than a game, and is only limited by your ingenuity. You keep having to go back for one more go, and it keeps surprising - for example I’ve just discovered the Namekuji grows when it gets wet.

The original appears to be at DOFI-BLOG which also has smaller, faster and earlier versions - even a version with little Zombies…

Esoteric Programming Languages

Many thanks to New Scientist magazine’s Feedback for mentioning DangerMouse's collection of esoteric languages and algorithms. They were particularly impressed by the Intelligent Design Sort, though personally I find the Drop Sort more intellectually satisfying.

I now realise that all that time at University writing QuickSorts in Pascal was wasted - I could have been writing Hanoi sorts in Ook!

Incidentally I’m sure that somebody once proposed an extended BASIC that replaced the GOTO with a much more useful COME FROM statement…

Bacteria Gardens

Haven’t got time to weed a full-sized garden, then why not try a Garden in a Petri dish?

Personally I prefer to leave a half-drunk coffee mug sitting on top of the PC. After a few days new and exciting forms of life spring up and start to colonise the drink’s surface. Given a few more weeks, complete civilisations of bacteria will have evolved, looked out at the universe around them and started to develop interplanetary flight.

Design your own CPU

Every time I happen across the 74HCTXXX pin-out page in the Maplin catalogue I get a deep longing to design my own computer from the NAND gates up. Nostalgic dreams of front panels full of flashing lights and rows of toggle switches, of operating systems that fit into Kilobytes rather than Gigabytes swirl before my eyes.

Rather than just dream, Bill Buzbee has designed and built a superbly engineered home brew CPU from about 200 74-series TTL chips. Once you’ve marveled at the details of Magic-1, check out the Links page and the Homebuilt CPU ring.

Strandbeest

Kinetic art on an amazing scale. Watch the videos to get a feel for the size and speed of these amazing wind-powered wandering constructions by Theo Jansen.

Little People

A fascinating project creating and photographing street art on an unexpected scale. I must have walked past “Office Politics” on the way to and from work and didn’t spot it. I can only wonder what I would have done if I had…