Collaborate Disseminate
After recently putting together the paper tape reader for his custom tube-based UE1 computer, [David Lovett] did get squiggles on the outputs, but not quite the right ones. In the …read more Continue reading Debugging the UE1 Paper Tape Reader and Amplification Circuit
While it’s currently the start of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it will inevitably get cold again. If you’re looking for a unique way of heating your workshop this year, …read more Continue reading 8-Bits and 1,120 Triodes
The earliest stored program computer in the modern sense was not one of the names such as ENIAC or Colossus that you might expect, but the Manchester Baby, an experimental …read more Continue reading An Entire Computer In ICMP Packets
In a few museums around the world, there lies the special experience of seeing some of the earliest computers. These room-filling monsters have multiple racks of vacuum tubes that are …read more Continue reading The First New Vacuum Tube Computer Design For Well Over Half A Century
When you write a program for your computer, whether it is a desktop machine, a microcontroller, or a supercomputer, the chances are that you use software tools to help you get the job done. High level languages, compilers, linkers, assemblers, debuggers, and code libraries have become so integrated that in many cases you will barely be aware of their existence. To all intents and purposes this huge toolchain will be the computer. But the first computer programmers had none of these luxuries. They had to hand assemble their own binaries, check them by hand, and debug them by guessing what …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: Here’s How They Programmed the EDSAC Computer
[Uniservo] made a video of a tube he’s been trying to acquire for a long time: a Rogers 6047 additron. Never heard of an additron? We hadn’t either. But it was a full binary adder in a single vacuum tube made in Canada around 1950. You can see the video below.
The unique tubes were made for the University of Toronto Electronic Computer (UTEC). A normal tube-based computer would require several tubes to perform an addition, but the additron was a single tube that used beam switching to perform the addition in a single package. [Uniservo] points out how the …read more
[Uniservo] made a video of a tube he’s been trying to acquire for a long time: a Rogers 6047 additron. Never heard of an additron? We hadn’t either. But it was a full binary adder in a single vacuum tube made in Canada around 1950. You can see the video below.
The unique tubes were made for the University of Toronto Electronic Computer (UTEC). A normal tube-based computer would require several tubes to perform an addition, but the additron was a single tube that used beam switching to perform the addition in a single package. [Uniservo] points out how the …read more
