alt Hacker NewsA 1961 Relay Computer Running in the Browser
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well the fact that you can wire the Rotary Switch to power and the thing physically rotates --- that's definitely Haptic Feedback that i dont ever recall seeing in a computer. lol.
that manual is wild too. entire section on games.
reminds me a lot of those old radioshack "build your own circuit" boards. the wires to components especially but also the manual, the way it just builds up dozens of examples from simple to complex, so if you really wanted to, a child could work their way through it slowly and understand everything.
looks like the inflation adjusted cost would be around 900 bucks today.
When you attach a name as inventor of something, it sounds as if the whole concept was borne by them, which is not true. All "inventors" and "great leaders" are only carriers of incremental change, which sometimes marks a milestone for a series of changes done by their predecessors or the context.
Steam engine concepts were already there before Jame Watt, logic by electrical circuits was already there before Shannon. People provide incremental guidance for the change, like river banks do to the flow of the river. No single part of the river brought the river upto that point.
"Before microchips existed, computers were built with mechanical relays." Should probably say something about vacuum tubes as well!
It's almost hard to believe this is possible now in a modern web browser. It's a really sublime thing and I'm glad someone figured out a way to do this. I remember Web 1.0 before the days of JavaScript and P.H.P. allowed interactive websites... Indeed, it's entirely different now.
Do NOT overlook the manual .PDFs. They are crazy awesome. These people cared about what they were doing.
Ah yes, I have a stack of these; lovely things for kids to learn some basic stuff. They are the oldest systems I own and they still work (they are fairly easy to fix).
shameless plug https://github.com/artemonster/relay-cpu a great and useless hobby project :) 10/10 would do again
Relay computers must have been pretty loud with all those clacking mechanical switches.
I imagine it would be easier for me to build the simulator than to make it do anything of interest.
Thank you so much everyone, this is something I've worked on for a few years on and off -- I posted about it here in a Show HN a few hours ago [0]
The biggest unlock was finding Willy McAllister's excellent Circuit Sandbox [1], which provides the Minivac Simulator's underlying electrical math. I tried so many approaches to simulate electricity (a doomed DIY approach, Falstad, Spice...) but Circuit Sandbox's DC analysis did the job perfectly.
Ping me for questions, and would love to read your feedback!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945762
[1] https://spinningnumbers.org/a/circuit-sandbox.html