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Mechanical Computing
FTL writes "Tim Robinson has built a computer capable of solving polynomial equations -- using Meccano. His difference engine (mirror) uses a similar approach to Babbage's design. He's also created a differential analyzer (mirror) complete with a GUI. Both could be scaled up indefinitely to handle larger problems. 'Computing by steam' is possible."
Strange. I thought Mechanical Computing was in the past
No really - this is art...
The steaming vents on the case gave mute testimony to the utter destruction the water made as it transisioned rapidly from liquid form to gaseous form. Poor devil...
Of course, I could also see something like that from the original "Wild, Wild West" tv show (and not the horrific movie of the same name), or maybe "Brisco County, Jr.".
"Snoochie-Boochies? Who talks like that? That is babytalk!"-Jay, Chasing Amy
Here: http://freecache.org/http://www.meccano.us/differe ntial_analyzers/robinson_da/index.html.
user@host$ diff
1835 called; they want their revolutionary technological ideas back.
FUCK PATENTS! FUCK DRM! Take my computer, and I'll build another from MECCANO!!! Take my Meccano, and I'll build a computer from root vegetables! Bwahahaha!
:-( )
More seriously, this illustrates just _why_ the I"P" neofascists are on a losing streak in the long run (but so was the xtian church, and the dark ages still lasted most of a millenium - so that doesn't fill me with glee. It mightn't be until the year 3000 that we leave the new I"P" dark age
Don't forget about the Tinkertoy computer
Table-ized A.I.
Mechanical computers were built and used over 60 years ago to solve differential equations and other analytical type problems. I know MIT and UCLA had pretty good mechanical computers in the WWII era. Check out MIT's famous mechanical differential analyzer for and idea of what was and is and awesome piece of hardware.
I always wanted a PC I could shovel coal into.
Reminds me of the nano-scale "rod logic" used for computation in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". Those were rods with bumps on them arranged in a 3d grid, and as the were moved back and forth the bumps somehow performed computation.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
I recon this guy should try to build a machine that uses computational logic gates (NAND, NOR, etc). From that, he can build up things like binary adders and simple flip-flops. Then, add an instruction-decoder, and an arithmetic-logic unit - and viola - a Meccano CPU.
was a mechanical rig that used 1 inch soda straws for 1's and blank holes fro zeros. You pulled a crank and it added two numbers. I wish I could remember its name - it was some sort of "science kit." from the 60's.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Is get a C compiler working. I want to see it running Linux within the year!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Enjoy a nice unsorted list of some images, courtesy of FreeCache. I wish more people would use this service in the future.
And some more links that the author is working on, apparently:
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Table-ized A.I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course mechanical computation is possible. The easiest example I can think of is division/multiplication. Two gears, the ratio of which is the multiplier. Turn the first gear a number of turns equal to the multiplicand and count the rotations of the second gear.
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Crudely Drawn Games
Into the old saying that physicists love to say: "crank the handle on the mathematics".
...and William Gibson, called The Difference Engine. I recommend it, it's a fascinating idea, which is basically: what if computer became available much earlier, in the form of mechanical computers--they would take up entire factory buildings, and people would essentially become experts at creating these ornate ivory punchcards (if I remember correctly...). Actually, I should really pick it up and read it again.
Serious kudos due here - it's a labour of love.
Why does no one seems to come with the swap issue ? Such a system would surely be faster without swap... Specially if swap has to be handled manually (like, swapping the device).
I'ill buy one!
When the WorldWar 3/glacial age is over and everything is destroyed i will have an extremely powerful machine, the most powerful computer in the world.
No, really, no one knows when this kind of inventions will be really useful. And im not a pessimist.
This is a true hack, in the purest sense.
I'm equally impressed over building it using only off the shelf parts as I am over building it at all.
Who will be the first to port this to Lego?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 . .That's as high as I can go, a dinosaur ate my pinky toe
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these . . .
Seriously, I am totally amazed at that guy's genius. Full on Wayne's World "Not Worthy!" moment.
Hello Dodge Hemi!
A.K. Dewdney describes in "The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations" not only the famous Tinkertoy computer, but also how a computer can be constructed entitely from ropes and pulleys. Furthermore, in "The Planiverse" he describes how a computer can be built in a two-dimensional world (quite a feat, I can tell you).
So, is it available in the USA? If not, are lawyers at fault? (presumably) Has it ever been available in the States?
My web search so far led to an interesting dead end. Click on the USA link from meccano.com, and you end up at a toy distributor that doesn't appear to carry the stuff!
mt
Does it run Linux?
That's OK, but for the man of the 50's on the go what do you do? You get a CURTA calculator. They were said to be popular with rally drivers for instance.
They are relatively valuable and pretty nifty calculator. You can try to get a feel for it with the simulator. Enjoy!
When can we expect a Duke Nukem Forever port on one of these things???
. . . . Linux gets ported to steampunk arcitecture?
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
My dad was selling those newfangled electronic Friden calculators back in the mid sixties when I was a little kid. Once in a while, he'd bring home one of the old mechanical machines that had been traded in, like this one. I'd love to have one of those babies now.
When I was a younger, I had a few meccano sets. This was maybe 14-15 years ago though. I wasn't too impressed with them as the parts tended to come loose and were quite wobbly.
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Thats a lot of work to re-create something like that.
He deserves some credit for it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Everyone knows a computer is a young woman sitting behind an adding machine.
(at least until the 60s, thats exactly what was meant by a 'computer')
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...it's 640k = "655360 nuts and bolts should be enough for everybody". And if it isn't, I think they have a few screws loose or missing instead.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And the know-how to use it, primarily so I could build my own Babbage engine. Never ocurred to me to do it with legos. ;P
big deal. This Thing is over 2,000 years old! It's an astronaumical computer and clock thingie. With gears and everything. "boo ya," as the kids say.
A Turing Machine can, theoretically, do all calculations a computer can, and it's entirely mechanical.
One can build such a machine with nuts and bolts or whatever, and solve every solvable problem.
Still, nobody actually built such a thing, AFAIK.
See the above wikipedia link, "A physical Turing machine".
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...
Yes, yes, it's all fine and good - but does it run Linux??
What an amazing feat. Congratulations.
:)
/. in order to keep an eye on how their cute little trained monkeys are doing.
For those fortunate enough to live near Silicon Valley, the original SGI building over on Shoreline has been converted to the Computer History Museum http://www.computerhistory.org/
I saw part of this collection when it was housed at the nearby Moffit Field (NASA Ames). When you look at this stuff and see how fast things have developed, you KNOW it had to be due to extraterrestrial intervention because humans are far too bone-headed to have accomplished such feats.
Of course, most of the aliens now frequent
.... de-evolution of the computing goal of making things easier to do....
But as MS has proven and Linux follows thru in its own way...... "make people need you is the path to success"...
Well at least now we can hire coal shovelers into the IT business....
all your coal belong to us....
" Strange. I thought Mechanical Computing was in the past"
The mechanical meets the electrical, and is practical , possibly using fluids among other things.
Perhaps this thing will take enough time to complete a problem to allow the owner to toss the broken-off tree branch that appears in the picture off the deck.
YOU FAIL IT! On behalf of... GNAA
YOU FAIL IT!
Charles Babbage gave up on the differiensial engine because he thought he could build a general purpose mechanical computer - the Analytical Engine! To recreate that device would really rock... if I had the time, money and (last but not least) the knowhow, I might try it myself...
Off course, an Analytical Engine would be way larger than a Difference Engine , since it would have to include a CPU (the 'mill'), a input device (Babbage himself suggested punch cards - an idea which the early electromechanical computers picked up), an output device (Babbage wanted to built a complete, automated printingpress, curveplotter and a bell to alert the operator of errors),and last but not least a 'store' (memory - the one envisoned by Babbage would store 1000 numbers, each 50 digits long). The Analytical Enginge was to be programable - which was it great strenght compared to the Differensial Engine - in a language resembling todays assembler languages. Such a machine would be slow and lowpowered by our standards, but would have been a gigantic leap forward back in the 1830's... shame he never got around to build it.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
To see "DA" in action rent the movie "When Worlds Collide". It's not bad as 50's sci-fi goes.
granted a steam engine would be cool, but to accually compute by steam many steam pistons and levers would be needed to make the accual mechanisms, not just the drive. it's like saying desktops compute with electriciy, they realle just run off of it.
um... yah, he's cleverer than me i'd say :)
"...but Professor, you told me I can bring any graphical calculator."
--
Advertisement: HP Customers are migrating to SUN. As well might as be burnt than being put on hold by HP's new Indian customer service rep.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I've read the book "The Tinker Toy computer" and it occured to me if you have enough rope, pullies, springs and the means to assemble them you could make a machine with sufficient prossesing power to have AI. The only real obsticle would be finding all the materials and the man-power to create this machine. A warehouse full of rope could be smarter then any human, unless that human had scisors.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Meccano History
Most of the electricity that we're using is created by steam power. The majority of power plants operate by creating steam from fosil fuels, or by using nuclear power (which, although very simplified, still boils water to create steam to turn turbines).
There's only a few other methods that create power such as wind (think of that pass in California with all the wind turbines) on a large scale. New "peaker plants" generally use what is a modified jet engine to turn a turbine (but still collect waste heat to boil water).
In the end, all power plants rely on mechanical turbines to produce the actual power.
In order to succeed in the market today, it has to run viruses. Is someone working on version of rugrat for this beast?
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!
the first mechanical digital computer ever made.
The whole book, The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse is well worth a read.
"Great novel"? Um.. it's a beatiful, incredibly well-realized world. But it has a sad excuse for a plot (a communist plot to steal a deck of punched cards that can win you the lottery) and mostly two-dimensional characters. The contents of the last page (I won't spoil it, but it's kinda lame) have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the plot, anywhere. It's a totally gimmicky post-ending element with no function in the story.
Great novels require more than amazing world building. Both Sterling and Gibson have written far better books than that one, though I personally think Gibson has never really matched Neuromancer in his later work.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
"It's a power so great is can ONLY be used for GOOD...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
He couldn't build it, as the engineering skills weren't there at the time to create some of the tolerances needed in certain components. It could easily be done nowadays - we just need some willpower and a big garage. Oh, and a big steaming pile of cash.
[FUCK BETA]
After the apocalypse we can start over one step above the abacus and slide rule.
Can someone please build these machines at the molecular level?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
"Hartee began trying to build a Meccano model 'more for amusement than with any serious purpose', which was so successful that, with the help of a student, Arthur Porter, he built a small differential analyser using many standard Meccano parts. It was capable of useful work, and gave good practice in 'programming' whilst the full-size analyser was under construction."
I think someone about 10 or so years ago actually did build a working replica of his first Difference engine. They even built it restricting themselves to the precision of the tools that were available in Babbage's days. Apparently, one of the plans was drawn backwards, but they fixed that in the replica. Now, if they could do one of the Analytical engine.
The Curta is definitely a very cool gadget, but since they're collector's items, the prices can be outrageously high.
Although the VCALC Curta Page mentions that most of the old Curta technicians who worked on the devices have made replicas at some point or other, nobody seems to be doing it today.
With the huge interest in them (since the Scientific American article), and the high prices, I'm very surprised that nobody's making low cost replicas. I'm sure lots of geeks who are more enamoured with the technology than the history would love to have a knock-off and the patents have probably long since expired.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
I've written process control software, and it's a little bit weird to be using millions of transistors to run a software emulation of a fairly simple analog circuit. The advantage is that my emulation doesn't drift with ambient temperature or component aging, and it can be tweaked without using a soldering iron.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Actually, the Difference Engine #2 was built by the Science Museum in the UK and completed in 1991 to mark the bicentennial of Babbage's birth.
It is interesting to note that while Babbage had tried to realize the difference engine #1 and the analytical engine in metal, he had not ever tried to have the difference engine #2 built.
From the link: "Modern techniques were used in the manufacture of repeat parts but care was taken to restrict limits of precision to those achievable by Babbage."
That's the whole point. Babbage was stopped as much by the limitations of the era's technology as by anything else. By all accounts he was an oddball, but he was also a genius and a pioneer.
"Don't touch it, it's the history eraser button you fool!"
Nice, but... does it run Windows?
Rod logic is (to the best of my recollection) basically a mechanical implementation of numerical AND, OR etc. Once you have that working you're not too far from an assembly language (for assemblers, ha ha). See chapter 12 of Drexler's Nanosystems, which Stephenson presumably got the idea from.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Wow! Looking at the pictures of the machine, I recognize it is actually built from parts of the czech gadget construction kit known for decades as "Merkur".
I used to play with this kit as child, some 35 years ago. This kit has a quite a renaissance in toy shops now here. It was designed in early sixties.
At age of 9, I actually built a four wheeled electro powered and bowden controlled flamethrower carriage with integrated candle (flame source) and hair spray (very good flammable these days).
I called it proudly a flame "tank", and it was fully operational at range of 40cm flame with all the consequences, if you know what I mean...
Even later, I used the kit to prototype some computer home made peripherals back in 8-bit era, for example a punch tape reader for "tapes" made from used 35mm perforated camera films. The device was dismissed at the moment I could afford a cassette tape recorder...
There you are, staring at me again.
$my_previous_post =~ s|great novel|very interesting book|g; Satisfied? Sheesh, you slashdotters are so picky sometimes...
you talk shit neil