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If you ever visit Berlin, especially with kids, the city has a lovely Technology Museum with an computer section that also features Zuse replicas and gear, incl

by sho_hn 2y ago

If you ever visit Berlin, especially with kids, the city has a lovely Technology Museum with an computer section that also features Zuse replicas and gear, including a replica of the still-mechanical Z1. I think Zuse himself made and donated it to the museum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)#/media/File%3AGerman_Museum_of_Technology%2C_Berlin_2017_024.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)#/media/File%3A... I absolutely love the giant honking hand-crank you can manually turn to make it go. As a child seeing the mechanical Z1 really drove home for me that computers are understandable and not magic, literally breaking what they do down into little managable parts and steps and the art of making a computer is in sizing (how many adders do you need?) and arrangement (how can you make it produce results faster?). With some erudite commentary and informed pointing-at-things I think you have a good chance to recreate that revelation for your kids too. More info on the Z1: https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/inf/groups/ag-ki/publications/Z1-Architecture/Z1-Architecture.pdf https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/inf/groups/ag-ki/publications/Z1... It's quite magnificent how close this still is to modern CPU architectures, the major innovation of branch prediction aside.

mark_undoio 2y ago
One thing that struck me about the Z1 was how closely it paralleled things I'd expect to see in a silicon implementation of a CPU: I recall seeing: different physical blocks for different logic, a big regular blog for the memory and other blocks for ALU, etc, addressing handled by column and row selection lines, evaluating bit values by putting a signal onto the data line and seeing whether the value changes... But all implemented with mechanical linkages (so a signal is a pull of a rod, a connection is a hooking of a rod onto some other linkage, etc.

by sho_hn 2y ago

mark_undoio 2y ago

One thing that struck me about the Z1 was how closely it paralleled things I'd expect to see in a silicon implementation of a CPU: I recall seeing: different physical blocks for different logic, a big regular blog for the memory and other blocks for ALU, etc, addressing handled by column and row selection lines, evaluating bit values by putting a signal onto the data line and seeing whether the value changes... But all implemented with mechanical linkages (so a signal is a pull of a rod, a connection is a hooking of a rod onto some other linkage, etc.