Matthias Wandel built a rudimentary digital computer out of wood. The ingenious Binary Marble Adding Machine is, basically, a 6-bit adder that runs on gravity and uses mechanical flip-flops for memory storage.
[ schematic courtesy of Matthias Wandel ]
Here’s a demo video:
More info on the lovely Marble Adding Machine:
Other interesting creations of Matthias Wandel:
(hat tip: Rick Regan)
One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested.
– Danny Hillis [1]
When Danny Hillis (b. 1956) was a graduate student at MIT‘s Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab in the early 1980s, he built a massively parallel supercomputer which he named the Connection Machine. At the time, computers were still somewhat ENIAC-like: sequential, single-processor machines. By contrast, the Connection Machine had over 65,000 processors! The Connection Machine was the topic of Danny Hillis’ PhD thesis [2], supervised by Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman.
[ Connection Machine 2 ]
Danny Hillis‘ motivation to build such a parallel computer stemmed from his desire to explore new paradigms of computation outside the traditional von Neumann architecture. Hillis believed that Computer Science needed fresh ideas, and he turned to Physics as a source of inspiration [3].
Although the Connection Machine was initially intended for applications in Artificial Intelligence, later versions of it (CM-2, CM-5) were used with remarkable success in Computational Physics (e.g., Lattice QCD [4]).
In 1983 Danny Hillis co-founded a company named Thinking Machines Corporation (TMC) in order to exploit possible commercial applications of the Connection Machine paradigm. Folly, poor business sense, and competition from established supercomputer firms forced TMC into bankruptcy in 1993 [5].
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References:
[1] Danny Hillis, Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine.
[2] Danny Hillis, The Connection Machine, Ph.D. thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), MIT, 1988.
[3] Danny Hillis, New Computer Architectures and their relationship to Physics, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol 21, Nos. 3/4, 1982.
[4] Geoffrey C. Fox, Roy D. Williams, Paul C. Messina, Parallel Computing Works: QCD on the Connection Machine, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1994.
[5] Gary A. Taubes, The Rise and Fall of Thinking Machines, Inc.com, September 15, 1995.
Until fairly recently, I had never heard of Curta calculators. These little mechanical marvels were invented by Curt Herzstark (1902-1988) in the late 1930s, and from the late 1940s until the early 1970s they were popular portable calculators. Eventually, they were replaced by portable electronic calculators.
Andrew Carol’s impressive Lego Difference Engine is a mechanical computer built with LEGO pieces:
From Andy Carol’s website:
Before the day of computers and pocket calculators all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes. The larger efforts involved rooms of semi skilled people, called ‘computers’, capable of doing reliable arithmetic who would be under the direction of a skilled mathematician. In the mid-19th century, people began to design machines to automate this error prone process. Many machines of various designs were eventually built but, the most advanced and famous of these was not. The Babbage Difference Engine.
Andy Carol’s Difference Engine solves 2nd and 3rd order polynomials to three or four digits. If the idea of building a mechanical computer seems a bit odd to you, note that until the 1970s there were no pocket electronic calculators, and therefore engineers had to use slide rules.
Last month David E. Shaw was at Stanford University to give a talk on biomolecular simulation: New Architectures for a New Biology. You can watch the presentation video here:
