There’s something strangely fascinating with watching the videos of this home designed relay-based computer operate.
I featured a relay-based home-built computer some time early in the life of this blog and recently found out about this “Relay Computer Two” by another inventor.
It features 268 relays configured for an 8-bit instruction word and 16-bit address bus. This is slightly less than the 400 relays used in the linked post above so the builder had to implement some short-cuts such as a floating-zero condition.
Check the below video of the relay computer two in operation and see if you get the same odd fascination with hearing it click while the LEDs display the status of the various registers 😉
And I thought the fan in my machine was loud. 🙂
That’s a great point, Alan! The relay computer is one of those things that’s fun to play with, but at the end of the day, you’re happy you don’t own it!
I’m glad that my computer isn’t that loud. 🙂