DESIGNING A RELAY COMPUTER: The Idea

JUST A RANT....
While learning about things in school, I believe, we have developed this habit of learning things for the sake of learning them i.e. learning without context. This, I believe, causes one of the two things,
we either feel that we do not have the intellect to understand how something works,
or we feel we know all that can be known.

Everything ever taught is so vague that its almost useless. take for example what we are taught about computers:
we know a CPU (Central Processing Unit) has 3 parts;
ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit), CU (Control Unit) and memory. Yet all we know about them is their full forms and a one line description of their role in a computer.
We know that computers understand machine language and that machine language is a bunch of 1's and 0's but no one really explains how does that happen.
So, for most people a computer is just a magical black box. They command it to do stuff and that box does it.

Let's talk computers:

For almost a year now I have had this project in mind, to design and build a working computer. when I say building a computer i don't mean getting a motherboard buying the latest multi-core processor. when i say a computer, i mean designing an actual processor with hardware that has its own machine language. and try and write programs for it.The inspiration of this project came to me after I spent my summer break studying Ben Eater's "8-bit Breadboard Computer".

This was the first time I actually felt that I kind of understood how computers worked and how they executed programs to the extent that i felt i could make one too!....

If u look at computer history you realize that there are different ways to make digital computers.
you could in theory make:
mechanical computers,
electro-mechanical i.e. relay computers,
vacuum tube computers,
computers with discrete transistors,
computers with digital logic chips,
or program FPGAs.
Regardless of how you make the computer the fundamentals of digital computation remain the same.

The aim of this project is not to make a computer that is better than our modern computers. The aim is to make a machine that makes it easy for people to not only understand how computers work but also appreciate the astounding brilliance of the concept of digital computation itself.

In the upcoming blogs I will be discussing in detail about this computer I am working on. So, stick around maybe???

Got any queries???

E-Mail me at: shashwath.sundar@gmail.com

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DESIGNING A RELAY COMPUTER: Relays

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