Lengthy earlier than electrical energy was a standard family utility, humanity had been constructing machines to do many duties that we’d now simply strap a motor or set of batteries onto and assume nothing of it. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and primarily every part had non-electric analogs, and maybe surprisingly, there have been mechanical computer systems as effectively. Electronics-based computer systems are far superior in primarily each method, however the aesthetics of a mechanical laptop are nonetheless unmatched, like this 8-bit machine constructed from Okay’nex.
Extra after the break…
The Okay’nex laptop is constructed by [Shadowman39], and this primary video options simply the ALU. It might settle for numbers from 0-255 or -128 to 127 and might add two of those numbers by storing them in registers utilizing levers to symbolize every digit. A drive system beneath with a rack and pinion system operates on every digit, ultimately outputting the sum. It might additionally carry out different mathematical operations like subtraction and dealing with damaging numbers utilizing the 2’s complement technique.
Though this video solely goes over the ALU for the mechanical laptop, we stay up for [Shadowman39]’s future movies, which go over the opposite components of the machine. The fundamentals of the pc are proven in intricate element. Mechanical computer systems like these, whereas usually constructed as ardour initiatives and never as usable computer systems, are glorious methods to get a deeper understanding of their electronics-based cousins. One other strategy to dive deep into this kind of computing world is by constructing a relay laptop.
