January 20, 2006

Harry Porter's Computer

Very high geekdom! Dr. Porter teaches Computer Science at Portland State University and in his spare time, he is building a working computer. Out of mechanical relays! Take a look at Harry Porter's Computer Bring your drool cups -- Dr. Porter's geek-fu is greater than mine.
harry-porter-relay.jpg
One of the 415 relays.
harry-porter-overview.jpg
Dr. Porter and his Computer
harry-porter-register.jpg
A close look at one of the registers.
He did 'cheat' and use a 32K by 8bit static RAM for system memory (otherwise we would be looking at another 524,288 relays!) but it is a beautiful and classical Von Neumann processor and probably just as powerful as the early relay machines (no benchmarks are given and Dr. Porter doesn't mention if he got it to boot Linux yet). Posted by DaveH at January 20, 2006 11:16 PM
Comments

That is incredible, thanks for the pointer.

Posted by: Don McArthur at January 21, 2006 5:31 PM
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