[HN Gopher] 3Hz Computer, Hold the Transistors
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3Hz Computer, Hold the Transistors
Author : ingve
Score : 182 points
Date : 2022-08-05 07:36 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mcyoung.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (mcyoung.xyz)
| dav_Oz wrote:
| Also a fascinating story behind the inventor Curt Herzstark (born
| in 1902 in Vienna).
|
| From his very early years he was able to tinker in his father's
| workshop simply called "Austria" the first (mechanical)
| calculator plant in Austria-Hungary, back in 1905.
|
| Because of his Jewish heritage the company was taken over by the
| Nazis in 1938 and he was later put in Buchenwald in 1943. An
| excerpt [0] taken from an interview [1] in 1987 (1 year before
| his death):
|
| _While I was imprisoned inside Buchenwald I had, after a few
| days, told the [people] in the work production scheduling
| department of my ideas. The head of the department, Mr. Munich
| said, 'See, Herzstark, I understand you've been working on a new
| thing, a small calculating machine. Do you know, I can give you a
| tip. We will allow you to make and draw everything. If it is
| really worth something, then we will give it to the Fuhrer as a
| present after we win the war. Then, surely, you will be made an
| Aryan.' For me, that was the first time I thought to myself, my
| God, if you do this, you can extend your life. And then and there
| I started to draw the CURTA, the way I had imagined it._
|
| After the war he was nearly ripped off by the Prince of
| Liechtenstein (i.e. his financial backers)[0]:
|
| _It was not long before Herzstark 's financial backers, thinking
| they had got from him all they needed, conspired to force him out
| by reducing the value of all of the company's existing stock to
| zero, including his one-third interest. These were the same
| people who had earlier elected not to have Herzstark transfer
| ownership of his patents to the company, so that, should anyone
| sue, they would be suing Herzstark, not the company, thereby
| protecting themselves at Herzstark's expense. This ploy now
| backfired: without the patent rights, they could manufacture
| nothing. Herzstark was able to negotiate a new agreement, and
| money continued to flow to him._
|
| One important "innovation"/"simplification" for miniaturizing the
| calculator to a single _complemented step drum_ was the
| application of the _nines ' complement_ [2]:
|
| _The Curta calculator used the method of complements for
| subtraction, and managed to hide this from the user. Numbers were
| entered using digit input slides along the side of the device.
| The number on each slide was added to a result counter by a
| gearing mechanism which engaged cams on a rotating "echelon drum"
| (a.k.a. "step drum"). The drum was turned by use of a crank on
| the top of the instrument. The number of cams encountered by each
| digit as the crank turned was determined by the value of that
| digit. For example, if a slide is set to its "6" position, a row
| of 6 cams would be encountered around the drum corresponding to
| that position. For subtraction, the drum was shifted slightly
| before it was turned, which moved a different row of cams into
| position. This alternate row contained the nines' complement of
| the digits. Thus, the row of 6 cams that had been in position for
| addition now had a row with 3 cams. The shifted drum also engaged
| one extra cam which added 1 to the result (as required for the
| method of complements). The always present ten's complement
| "overflow 1" which carried out beyond the most significant digit
| of the results register was, in effect, discarded._
|
| For playing around here [3] a Curta sim.
|
| [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta#History
|
| [1]https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll92:50
|
| [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_complements#Practi..
| .
|
| [3]https://satadorus.eu/x_ite/yacs_2_0/yacs_2_0.html
| samizdis wrote:
| There's a decent fan/reference/info page for these [1] on
| vcalc,net. edit to add, also a decent Wikipedia page [2].
|
| [1] https://www.vcalc.net/cu.htm
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta
| emptyparadise wrote:
| Curta Assembly! What a cool idea.
| sackerhews wrote:
| I can't be the only one wishing there was a video of it in
| action?!
| mrighele wrote:
| You can find a couple of videos on YouTube, for example [1], at
| around 50 seconds.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhUfRIeRSZE
| kristopolous wrote:
| I always look for them in thrift stores expecting the shopkeeper
| to say "someone just dropped off a box of stuff cleaning out
| their grandparent's place. I have no idea what it is. Looks like
| a spice grinder. It's probably broken, doesn't seem to want to
| open. Take it for $3"
| Frenchgeek wrote:
| You can always make your own:
| https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1943171
| remram wrote:
| The assembly video for that is worth a skim:
| https://youtu.be/zh2Z11miQ0w
| lisper wrote:
| Heh, the end product strongly resembles a trash-can Mac
| Pro.
| pluijzer wrote:
| Not in the same order of magnitude but this is how I bought my
| IBM Model M keyboard for 50 cents from a pile of those crappy
| "multimedia keyboards".
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I have two stories like this:
|
| One thrift store had a DEC TU-58 tape drive. I bought for $20
| and immediately sold on eBay for $400 (I would have kept it,
| but have no DEC stuff to use with it at all).
|
| Another thrift store had a late 60s / early 70s electronic
| calculator that used acoustic delay line memory and a CRT for
| display. I think I paid $100, played with it for a while, then
| sold it for $600. Unfortunately, it was damaged in shipping (it
| was well packed), and UPS had to pay up.
|
| I bought a Curta recently, but is was not a good deal. Prices
| just keep going up on them.. I wish I had bought one in the
| early 2000s when they were still below $500.
|
| Other mechanical calculators are reasonable. Aside from the
| Curta, only the really early ones are expensive.
| brettfo wrote:
| I have a Type I Curta and it's amazing. I love the logo, but
| could never find an accurate vector version so I carefully
| measured it and made a DXF and SVG of it. Hopefully somebody
| finds this useful:
|
| https://github.com/brettfo/curta
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| This makes me think about what are the principled requirements
| for artificial intelligence. It might be designed, it must have
| sensors and actuators, and it must have "goals" in some manner.
|
| But, does AI require digital computers? Can you have AI with
| analog computers? Or, are even computers required? Perhaps AI
| only requires the (artificial) design of intelligent processes in
| the world.
|
| For instance, the autopilot (known as "the Pilot's Assistant) was
| invented in 1912, long before digital computers. If that's an
| example of AI, then there is a need for conceptual
| reformulation...
| trasz wrote:
| It could use humans as actuators :-)
|
| As for the autopilot - a plane autopilot is fundamentally a
| device to make the plane go straight; you don't need AI, or
| much processing power at all, to do that.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Saying AI requires a digital computer is like saying biological
| intelligence requires a brain. If intelligence is substrate
| independent then it can run on anything.
| retrac wrote:
| > Can you have AI with analog computers?
|
| Pattern-recognizing neural networks can certainly exist as
| analog computers. The very first perceptron-based image
| recognition systems were analog and optoelectronic. A grid of
| light sensors wired up in a network, with the weights set by
| potentiometers, self-adjusted by little stepper motors during
| training.
|
| https://towardsdatascience.com/rosenblatts-perceptron-the-ve...
|
| https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| John McCarthy said of "artificial intelligence" that even his
| thermostat had beliefs. Sometimes it thinks the room is too
| hot, and sometimes it thinks the room is too cold.
| carapace wrote:
| In Cybernetics there's a result: every efficient self-
| regulating system must contain a model of itself. It's true
| even for the system of thermostat-and-room (although it's
| subtle.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Regulator
| 51Cards wrote:
| I have found all forms of mechanical calculators fascinating for
| years and have a few of these collected back in the days when
| they were cheap to find. Now most of them run a couple grand.
| They are wonderful little devices to play with. There are still a
| couple people in the US that will service them (it's a very
| tricky mechanism to reassemble).
| kuramitropolis wrote:
| Pattern recognition, eh?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Another interesting mechanical computer, the Zuse Z1, apparently
| ran at 1 Hz.
|
| "The first freely programmable computer in the world which used
| Boolean logic and binary floating-point numbers"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
| [deleted]
| nosianu wrote:
| This was my grandfathers calculator, which he used for some
| business calculations (he was a "master ('Meister') craftsman"
| painter in East Germany, responsible for a team) into the 1990s
| even after he already had an electronic calculator.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/jBDUHPp.jpeg
|
| Does anybody have any information about this machine? I used to
| be able to do simple calculations with it, but nowadays I don't
| remember anything at all. I guess using trial and error I might
| be able to do additions and multiplications, but I would not be
| able to use even a fraction of that machine's capabilities.
| Sadly, there's no (surviving?) handbook.
| samizdis wrote:
| There's a video of it on [1], and the page hosting it also has
| links to other resources. Might be helpful:
|
| https://www.jaapsch.net/mechcalc/melitta.htm
| wazoox wrote:
| If you like mechanical calculators, here's my FACIT:
| https://video.ploud.fr/w/6s76S5zfuBN5i1S35kMgHy
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Not really a computer - there is no way to program it. At best it
| is a mechanical RAM with some operations.
| naikrovek wrote:
| you can't program it, but you can run programs on it.
|
| it is not claimed to be an entire computer, but instead, an ALU
| and 1-2 registers. the article goes through this...
| tgv wrote:
| Lovely. I really admire the mechanical skills involved in making
| such a calculator. Mechanical devices seem intuitive. It's almost
| as if you could grab a chisel and a few pieces of wood and build
| something similar yourself, and that's when you _feel_ the
| complexity of the design.
| lisper wrote:
| You would probably enjoy:
| https://www.amazon.com/s?k=wood+pendulum+clock+kit
| denton-scratch wrote:
| That looks like a nice machine.
|
| At school we were taught to use mechanical adding machines
| similar to this. Ours were made to sit flat on the desk, and had
| a crank-handle on the side. They were a lot scruffier than that
| Certa!
|
| Within a year or two of those lessons, cheap electronic
| calculators became available.
| drcode wrote:
| You can spend many hours on Youtube looking at all the
| different desk calculators, they all are variations along these
| lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j88JslB67fU
| tommek4077 wrote:
| Yeah, great. But can it run Doom?! ;)
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(page generated 2022-08-07 23:01 UTC)