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.
One of the 415 relays.
Dr. Porter and his Computer
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