[HN Gopher] Mechanical computer relies on kirigami cubes, not el...
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Mechanical computer relies on kirigami cubes, not electronics
Author : gnabgib
Score : 114 points
Date : 2024-07-04 16:03 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.ncsu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.ncsu.edu)
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Have they made even a single working logic gate? The video only
| shows flipping bits back and forth by direct manipulation.
|
| Edit: I am happy to report yes:
|
| " _Last, we explore the metastructure as simple mechanical logic
| gates. Figure 8 (C and D) demonstrates the achievement of both
| "OR" and "AND" logic gate operations by using independent
| bistability in local elements._ "
| passwordoops wrote:
| They do in the full paper (not open source & at this time no
| one's put it on archive):
|
| "Mechanical logic gates Last, we explore the metastructure as
| simple mechanical logic gates. Figure 8 (C and D) demonstrates
| the achievement of both "OR" and "AND" logic gate operations by
| using independent bistability in local elements. To facilitate
| the reading of output information (see more details in fig.
| S17A and the Supplementary Materials), we use a supported
| height-adjustable flat plate on the top to cover a small region
| of the platform. Its initial state is set as an output of "0."
| When the plate is even and elevated, it outputs "1," otherwise
| "0" for the cases of either being tilted or lowered. The
| configurations of the top plate are determined by the pop-up
| ("1") or pop-down ("0") motions of three supports bonded to the
| bistable elements as inputs. A pyramid support denoted as P1 is
| placed in the center with two other neighboring supports
| surrounded, e.g., cuboids of S1 and S2 and pyramids of P2 and
| P3 for the OR and AND logic gate, respectively. Figure 8C and
| fig. S17B show that when P1 is popped up and fixed, popping-up
| either S1 or S2 or combined as inputs leads to a stable and
| evenly elevated plate on the top as an output of "1" for an OR
| operation, because one point contact at P1 alongside one plane
| contact at S1 or S2 will render a stable and even surface. For
| the case of AND logic gate shown in Fig. 8D and fig. S17C,
| three pyramid that supports Pi are free to pop up or down,
| providing the point contacts to support the top plate. Only
| when the plate is supported by three pop-up point contacts,
| i.e., P1 = P2 = P3 = 1, it will generate a stable and evenly
| elevated plate as an output of "1" for an AND operation. We
| note that most previous mechanical logic metastructures are
| limited to 1D and 2D structural forms (1-3, 11, 19, 20, 26, 29,
| 41). Our design extends the structural form of the mechanical
| binary logic computation to a 3D structural form. In Fig. 8 (D
| and E), we demonstrate the logic operation in only one zone. In
| particular, given the independent bistability of each local
| elements, such design principles can be readily applied to
| multiple zones for conducting a myriad of parallel mechanical
| binary operations on the same metastructure platform (see
| details in fig. S18). Moreover, by altering the structural
| components as schematically illustrated in fig. S19, we can
| also conduct "NOR" and "NAND" binary logic computations in our
| designed platform.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado6476
| bondarchuk wrote:
| There's a link to the paper in tfa, it's open access.
| abraae wrote:
| I believe a NAND gate is required as the base on which all
| other possible circuits can be built, so they need just to add
| an inverter for potential turing completeness.
| thih9 wrote:
| Could be either {NAND}, or {NOR}.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_completeness
|
| https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Functionally_Complete_Singleton_S.
| ..
| mtizim wrote:
| It's not, we just use NAND everywhere because they're easier
| to make with transistors. You can get functional completeness
| with a NOR instead, or alternatively with some different
| combinations of other logical operators.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_completeness
|
| We even implement AND gates with NANDs in electronics
| (because they're way simpler), but we might not have to limit
| ourselves to a single base gate with mechanical computers.
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| Has anyone ever done a society re-bootstrapping from "mechanical
| computation" back to working chips? As in-a planetwide em-event
| knocks out all computation- how do we get factories like TSMC
| back on track? How do we keep food production going? Could we
| recover from zero, using only this set of mechanical computers
| and basic instructions
| bondarchuk wrote:
| > _Has anyone ever done a society re-bootstrapping from
| "mechanical computation" back to working chips?_
|
| Thankfully not, since it hasn't been necessary yet... At any
| rate I would guess mental arithmetic would be much more
| practical than mechanical computers, and then we could probably
| skip straight to vacuum tubes and punch cards.
| Teever wrote:
| Don't forget about analog computers like mechanical
| integrators or the anthykra mechanism.
|
| Any device that would allow you to automate the production of
| devices like gears and cam shafts would greatly increase the
| bootstrapping rate.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| A mold is such a device. Doesn't have to be a mechanical
| computer per se.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Reading this thread I feel like I'm alive in the Star Trek
| universe. yesterday an article about warp drive, now
| discussing rebooting society after a global event and optical
| computers... interesting
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > As in-a planetwide em-event knocks out all computation
|
| This is an impossible scenario. There will always be working
| computers somewhere, either shielded, excluded from the
| disaster, or by luck. Now they may not be the easiest thing to
| get to, and if all you can find is an iPhone or some other
| trusted compute platform you're probably SOL.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _and if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted
| compute platform you 're probably SOL._
|
| Good point. The computer age is already poised to become a
| historical dark age; increasing adoption of trusted computing
| is only going to make this more severe.
|
| On the other hand, some of it is necessary; on the other,
| security is the sworn enemy of sugar, spice and everything
| nice.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| A scenario where general-purpose "unlocked" computers become
| extremely rare and nearly every computing device is a non-
| user-programmable appliance designed not to function without
| remote servers and regularly cycled cryptographic keys seems
| possible, though not inevitable. It would be a very stupid
| kind of apocalypse to live through if a solar storm didn't
| destroy many actual computers but did enough damage to brick
| 99.999% of the computers that survived intact, and left
| civilization with a crippling bootstrapping problem of
| capital's own design.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > left civilization with a crippling bootstrapping problem
| of capital's own design
|
| Sounds like the delicious irony humanity is known for.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| >if all you can find is an iPhone or some other trusted
| compute platform you're probably SOL
|
| This reason alone should be impetus, for national security
| reasons, to severely tax products containing universal
| machines the device owner does not have full control over (by
| additional purposeful actions beyond owners' simple ignorance
| of the technology). I say a 100% sales tax on the retail
| price is fair, all tax proceeds going to fund GNU-compatible
| competition to the likes of iPhone and Playstation (and your
| proprietary microwave, and car, and TV, and ...). A post
| collapse society having to deal with iPhones hopefully will
| adopt the [corporate] death penalty for proprietary
| shenanigans like this.
|
| It is borderline treasonous how many people will die because
| your product's bootloader was locked! Unforeseen
| consequences, Gordon.
| abound wrote:
| CollapseOS [1] comes to mind, but that's more about
| bootstrapping simple chips for directing power as opposed to
| rebooting society, but one could argue that the two go hand in
| hand.
|
| [1] http://collapseos.org/
| lawlessone wrote:
| Interesting. I had been thinking for a while of how i could
| fine tune an LLM for this sort of thing.
|
| It would act as oracle of sorts for how to start farming,
| build machines, etc.
|
| The power and hardware requirements would kind of make it
| useless though.
| burnished wrote:
| The real deal breaker is probably the part where it would
| confabulate details in processes where the details are
| important. I'm just imagining trying to learn farming
| techniques from an oracle that might instruct me to make
| fertilizer that sounded sensible but caused nitrogen burn.
| complaintdept wrote:
| I'm not convinced society would be able to recover after a
| collapse. We've extracted the easy to get resources already and
| what's left is extracted and refined with some really advanced
| technology. We can recycle a bunch of stuff, but that will only
| get you so far. On top of that, most of our knowledge is stored
| digitally, much of it in proprietary formats. If we don't
| somehow manage to recover it before the existing expertise dies
| out (assuming enough of it survives the initial catastrophe) we
| may not get it back for a very long time, if ever.
| wongarsu wrote:
| We would be at a huge disadvantage on the energy front. Most
| easily accessible fossil fuels are gone. Some countries have
| oil deposits that can be reasonably extracted now that the
| holes are made, but those places are few and far between.
|
| On the other hand there would be vast resources of refined
| steel, aluminum and other metals. The average home contains
| materials that would make a monarch from 200 years ago
| jealous. Not to mention invaluable machinery like precision
| lathes. You just need to find a way to power them.
|
| Without a readily available source for fertilizer and the
| supply chains necessary for modern agriculture we couldn't
| possibly feed more than a billion people or so. But whatever
| society rises from the ashes of that catastrophe could use
| the abundant building materials to harness water and wind
| energy and climb back up the technological ladder.
|
| Computing would be pretty low priority though, first we would
| need to get farming back on track. Without modern farming you
| need most of the population to work in agriculture,
| preventing you from making any significant progress in other
| fields.
| thechao wrote:
| Wind. Wind, by itself, without storage, isn't great for our
| version of civilization. However, it'd totally be workable
| for 19th c, at least, if not early 20th c. If there were
| clever storage solutions, you could run our civilization,
| but at a lower per capita energy budget, to begin with.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Most of the important resources we have extracted are sitting
| around on the surface. When the steel rusts, it turns into
| some of the best iron ore. Most of the stuff we threw away
| ends up in landfills, mining those will get lots of resources
| and knowledge. That would be plenty for pre-industrial
| civilization.
|
| The big problem is used the easy energy for industrial
| civilization. Solar mirrors and wind would be possible, but
| low density until more advanced. We assume that our energy-
| heavy industrial civilization is the only way, but it is
| possible that low-energy or low penetration industrial is
| possible. There is also possibility of biologically developed
| civilization.
|
| Lots of current knowledge would be lost but there are tons of
| books from current and earlier eras. If those are preserved,
| there would be plenty of knowledge for early industrial
| civilization. In fact, the main problem would be finding
| anything or getting caught looking at past. One thing we
| could do today is make more durable books, and then reprint
| the important things like practical knowledge.
| roughly wrote:
| > Most of the stuff we threw away ends up in landfills,
| mining those will get lots of resources and knowledge.
|
| I actually think this is something that's inevitable for us
| today. The amount of high-value material that we've
| "discarded" by collecting it into one place and then
| ignoring it - the processes need to be developed, but at
| some point we're going to recognize how much useable stuff
| we've just been piling up in the corner.
| dahart wrote:
| > I'm not convinced society would be able to recover after a
| collapse.
|
| Like ever? Or do you have a time frame in mind? Our current
| state is evidence enough that people can get there
| eventually. This is all fun imaginary speculation, of course,
| but I'd wager that even if we lost all written/stored
| information and the scientists and engineers, just knowing
| what was possible puts the remaining people _way_ ahead of
| where we were in the past. We didn't know what was possible
| the first time through, didn't know what to look for. Having
| memory of what existed and even a child's understanding of
| how it worked, passed by word of mouth, would probably be
| enough to dramatically accelerate progress compared to it's
| natural development.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ever. Depends on the collapse, but one view is we'd never
| get back. The easy sources of energy, ie coal and oil, have
| all been mined/drilled already, and you need those to
| jumpstart/bootstrap civilization to the point where you're
| able to produce enough food in order to have excess
| capacity of workers so you're able to get to renewable
| energy. Without those easy sources of energy, you don't get
| to have a post-collapse industrial revolution and you're
| stuck repurposing what's left over from the before times,
| and hoping it doesn't break because you can never make a
| fab to produce ICs to replace computers that break.
|
| Generations after the collapse, the stories of what's
| possible will be viewed the same way we view stories of
| dragons from the middle ages. Fiction.
| MrsPeaches wrote:
| Biggest issue is surely speed?
|
| Computers are measured in MHz and GHz. How do you even get
| close to that using mechanical means?
|
| Speed is also a core value proposition (to use contemporary
| parlance) of computers I.e computers can carry out calculations
| at a rate of MHz/Ghz. If you want to talk in any meaningful
| sense of "computation", and the usefulness thereof, speed of
| computation is a key metric.
|
| I reckon cooling would be an even bigger concern than it is
| currently.
| richk449 wrote:
| If you have no computers, getting to kHz is a huge advantage.
| Eniac ran at 100kHz (I think) and it was revolutionary.
| omoikane wrote:
| Note that mechanical computers aren't the only alternative to
| electric computers, biological computing is another area of
| active research:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing
|
| Speed and cooling might be less of an issue considering the
| scale which biological processes operate.
|
| Although biological computing sounds a lot like just doing
| everything by hand:
|
| https://xkcd.com/2173/
| throwAGIway wrote:
| You can't get biological computers without having very high
| speed computers though. This field of biology is very
| reliant on computer analysis.
| milkshakes wrote:
| not mechanical computers but
|
| http://collapseos.org/
| retrac wrote:
| Babbage went down the wrong rabbit hole. The technology of the
| 1860s was sufficient to make an automatic programmable
| computer. If you can make (or salvage) wire, and make simple
| sheet metal parts (brass will do) then you can make
| electromagnets, which means you can make relays. And there you
| go. No multimedia streaming, but automatic control and
| communication at a distance, yes.
| nine_k wrote:
| You would need plenty of electricity though.
|
| BTW one of my favorite crazy ideas is that by the times of
| the Middle Kingdom, ancient Egypt had all the material
| resources needed to build a phone system, or at least a
| telegraph system, very useful in a large country. Zinc and
| silver to create batteries. Plentiful copper, gold, and
| silver to create any kinds of wires, and techniques to finely
| process it. Some amounts of magnetic ferrous alloys from
| meteorites, and likely access to iron ores to produce more.
| Only very small amounts are needed for kernels of
| electromagnets and membranes. Paper and resin-based glues
| could be used to produce wire insulation. Very certainly they
| were able to work any available materials with good precision
| and sophistication.
|
| What they lacked was a good theory required to connect the
| pieces into a working phone system, like that of late 19th
| century.
|
| I sometimes think about what we are currently oblivious of,
| because certainly we have a plethora of resources to work
| with. (See also:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel))
| roughly wrote:
| I'm actually curious about the linguistics of something
| like a telegraph for ancient Egypt - I'm not particularly
| familiar with the Egyptian writing system from that era,
| but a strongly pictographic language, and one in which they
| seemed to regularly intersperse actual pictures and do
| things like manipulate symbol size to convey information
| doesn't seem to immediately suggest translation to an
| encoding like Morse like phonetic written languages do.
|
| In other words, if the ancient Egyptians had found
| themselves with the technology to create something like a
| telegraph, I wonder what they would have done with it -
| what possibilities suggest themselves given the visual
| representation of the Egyptian language.
|
| (I could actually see something like the Incan quipu being
| a much easier translation, if we're talking premodern
| "written" languages)
| andrehacker wrote:
| - Make a list of the most common (spoken) words - Sort
| them by usage frequency (most used words on top) -
| Associate a unique sequence of 0 and 1 (dot and dash) -
| Use shorter sequences for common words, longer ones for
| the words below - As you don't transit letters but words
| the transfer rate is much higher than in "modern"
| telegraph systems - profit ?
| dekhn wrote:
| So basically a prefix-free code with a symbol table of
| words.
| retrac wrote:
| Getting off topic here but, the Ancient Egyptian writing
| system was only marginally pictographic. The fully-
| developed system is essentially phonetic, using about ~40
| symbols to represent sounds, and a couple hundred
| pictograms (often interchanged with the full spelling).
| Closest analogy is probably the Japanese writing system,
| but with many fewer kanji. Carved hieroglyphs were highly
| formalized and ceremonial in nature, but ultimately, the
| quail chick means "u" and a foot means "b". (We inherit
| the letter "b" from the shape of that foot hieroglyph.)
|
| Have a look at the handwritten form, as would be used for
| papyrus books or official letters: https://upload.wikimed
| ia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/A_page_f...
| roughly wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know that!
| jf wrote:
| I highly recommend that you read the book "Hieroglyphs: A
| Very Short Introduction" which I expect you will enjoy as
| much as I did: https://academic.oup.com/book/470
|
| In short: Hieroglyphics were phonetic, but they eluded
| translation for centuries because only a small number of
| people could read and write them, and (importantly) the
| directions that the pictographs faced determined the
| direction that you'd read in.
|
| My favorite fact from this book is that the hieroglyphic
| word for "cat" is the combination of the sounds for "me"
| and "ew"
| roughly wrote:
| The Very Short Introduction series is fantastic - they
| really do a great job of distilling the core of a subject
| to give a lay person the conceptual framework to
| appreciate the topic. I've enjoyed every one I've read.
|
| > My favorite fact from this book is that the
| hieroglyphic word for "cat" is the combination of the
| sounds for "me" and "ew"
|
| Chinese is similar - the word for "cat" is "mao"!
| contingencies wrote:
| _The Information Super-Nile_. I like it. Perhaps elements
| of language used in cognitive expressions would begin to
| mirror through metaphor geographical terms used for
| proximity of major Nile features to the capital. Messages
| would become rafts. System operational periods, seasons.
| Fog of war would become a stagnant pond, or stilled flow.
| Riparian plants, ever-present information service
| providers such as scribes and couriers. Riparian birds
| with fleeting habits, commercial traders waiting to
| pounce in to action based on on news from afar.
| klyrs wrote:
| And here I've always thought that Babbage's big mistake was
| using decimal instead of binary.
| lcouturi wrote:
| But Babbage started in the 1830s, not the 1860s.
| brookst wrote:
| Not exactly that, but Souls in the Great Machine explores a
| society that relies entirely on mechanical computers. Good
| book.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What do you mean, done a society? Like a simulation or a
| thought experiment (plenty, I'm sure, with "varying" levels of
| rigor). Actually run the experiment? I'm sure not.
|
| Anyway it is generally impossible I'm pretty sure to do a
| "let's build a society" experiment. Even if you try really
| hard, it always favors strategies that have a positive expected
| value but an unacceptably high chance of failure, right? Like
| you know the worst case if you _actually_ fail is that you
| return to the real world and go to the hospital, so it is fine
| to take a risk that would give you like a 5% chance of getting
| an infection and dying. This has a 95% chance of working out
| but you'll get a critical failure if you roll the dice over
| many generations.
| duped wrote:
| The big problem is that modern chip manufacturing is impossible
| without the petrochemical industry, which itself needs the
| petrochemical industry to operate.
|
| The modern industrialized economy is built on industrial
| chemical production which stems from oil. If we lose the
| ability to extract or distribute oil it's going to be hard to
| bootstrap society.
|
| But if that happens we're all going to die from common
| infections and starvation before we worry about getting YouTube
| back online.
| dudinax wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine
| dekhn wrote:
| Only in science fiction, I think. See
| https://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwinter-Trilo...
| in which case natural neural-based computers are used to
| implement digital computation.
|
| I imagine the folks who built this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Tumble may have used
| computers to design/optimize the parts.
| passwordoops wrote:
| Link to the paper (sorry it's not open source!):
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado6476
| colordrops wrote:
| What are use cases of this? High radiation or otherwise extreme
| environments?
| snailmailman wrote:
| On Venus, the air corrodes any electronics incredibly quickly.
| Making it a difficult environment for spacecraft.
|
| With a mechanical solution, the parts can hopefully be more
| durable, as electrical conductivity could stop being a
| requirement.
| novaRom wrote:
| I think similar approaches might be useful in micro-
| electromechanical systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEMS)
| hughlett wrote:
| Go Pack!
| brotchie wrote:
| Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age IRL
| grondilu wrote:
| > Mechanical computers are computers that operate using
| mechanical components rather than electronic ones.
|
| For anyone who's excited about mechanical computers, perhaps it
| is worth reminding that an electron is about a thousand times
| lighter than a nucleon. Therefore, it's probably fair to say that
| mechanical computers will always be more energy consuming than
| electronic ones, because they fundamentally need to move atoms
| around to operate.
| jes5199 wrote:
| sure, but how many electrons do we typically move around as a
| single signal
| dekhn wrote:
| Few, if any; instead, it's typically the propagation of an
| electromagnetic wave that transmits a signal:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| what is the electromagnetic wave made of, what's the
| substrate it is composed of and moving through?
| dekhn wrote:
| The wave is electromagnetic energy passing through a
| waveguide (typically copper) mediated by electrons. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waveguide
| reaperman wrote:
| "Few", yes. But definitely some. I don't think you can have
| propagation of EM wave through a conduit without at least
| pushing one electron into the conduit and removing one
| electron from the other side of the conduit.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yes, but it's subtle; see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_current and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_mobility for more
| details
|
| I was pretty surprised about this since I had mistakenly
| believed that electrons had a velocity near the speed of
| light, which I think is only true in particle
| accelerators.
| reaperman wrote:
| Indeed - I thought most college Physics 2 courses teach
| that electrons actually move quite slowly through
| conductors. It's the "wave" which propagates near the
| speed of light, not the particles.
| dekhn wrote:
| My mistake was being a biologist, and skipping or
| sleeping my way through the EE part of physics :) and
| then saying the wrong thing in front of some very smart
| people
| reaperman wrote:
| Lord, I make that mistake on HN nearly every month. At
| least you didn't have a "Putnam award" moment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Maybe not more efficient, but maybe more resilient to
| electromagnetic storms, not prone to overheating (maybe),
| etc... Maybe it's about fitting constrained scenarios.
| Loughla wrote:
| It seems like they may be prone to overheating in some
| fashion. All that electricity and motion has to cause some
| kind of thermal load. Or am I way off base?
| chongli wrote:
| Yes. Friction is usually the limiting factor in mechanical
| systems. It causes a lot of heat, noise, stress, and wear
| on all interacting parts. It requires all sorts of messy
| approaches to mitigate, such as lubricants and bearings.
| Electricity is basically magic by comparison.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > but maybe more resilient to electromagnetic storms
|
| If you mean solar flares, that's generally an issue with long
| transmission lines, as opposed to very small circuits.
| reaperman wrote:
| Taking this to its logical extreme, photonic computing should
| be significantly more efficient than electronic computing.
| Eventually.
|
| Is that the end-game? Is there anything that would
| theoretically get closer to the Landauer limit than photonic
| computing? It's way out of my element but I suppose this is a
| good venue to ask the question.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
| infogulch wrote:
| The big problem in photonic computing is actually making an
| optical transistor, i.e. a switch where the presence of
| photons coming from one source controls whether of photons
| coming from another source pass. This is harder than
| electrical transistors because photons are bosons and don't
| interact with each other, so even theoretically this is hard
| to imagine.
|
| Papers that claim some progress pop up every once in a while
| but I haven't seen anything promising yet.
| reaperman wrote:
| Yes, general photonic computing is mostly "theoretical" at
| the moment. Still, discussion of theory is important. I
| wish I could add more to your comment but I'm so far out of
| my depth that it would be simply misleading (blind leading
| the blind). I believe there's theory saying it's
| theoretically possible to create efficient photon<->matter
| interfaces which could achieve transistor-like behavior ...
| but there's too much I don't understand to be able to
| evaluate whether there are inherent limitations which kill
| the practical application of the proposed theoretical
| mechanisms.
|
| I think we have seen come up with some practical
| applications of limited photonic "computing" at interface
| edges but I've heard that until we no longer need to
| convert photonics to electronics it won't surpass
| electronics for general computing.
| theturtle32 wrote:
| Kinda reminds me of QAM
| tombert wrote:
| If I ever become a billionaire, I am going to have an entire big
| room in my house dedicated to pre-electric computers. It's
| amazing how much stuff got borderline-trivial once the transistor
| became ubiquitous, and stuff like The Writer Automaton has always
| been something that has utterly fascinated me.
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