Binary marble adding machine

[made_of_paradox]

It's made of wood, and there's a cool video demonstrating its use.

Comments

[wesbante]

That was really cool

[lihan161051]

A friend of mine once suggested, jokingly, a steam-powered computer, I guess thinking of something like an Analytical Engine, but being a fairly decent Z80 coder at the time, my literally wired brain immediately started working on images of something similar to a Z80 or 8080 made up entirely of domed-diaphraghm steam valves arranged as logic gates and registers, pinging and popping in rhythm. It would have been limited to SRAM, which would fill up a fair sized warehouse space to house all the valves for that, but it would have worked. :D

(Then again, one of the projects we actually built was a very minimal Z80 computer on an electronics-lab breadboard box, which appeared to run and do what we expected on the bus LED's, and we had a much more complete one done in wire-wrap on a perforated board that was on its way to working when an ESD disaster happened and we had to scrap it ..)

[lihan161051]

I like the carry propagation and state dump, and it would even work with signed integers. :D (not sure a range of -32 to 31 would be useful, but it does at least prove two's complement notation!)

[mrhuggles]

Wow, that is so cool! I don't have flash on this computer, so I spent about five minutes trying to figure out how it worked by looking at the picture (and so I couldn't see where the holes were). That is really fun. If I ever want to show someone how binary works I think I'm going to use this.