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One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements of Computing Systems" by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a 4-bit CPU in Minecraft. 4-bit is s

One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements of Computing Systems" by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a 4-bit CPU in Minecraft. 4-bit is small enough that you can build it manually, without the use of external tools (which I don't think existed at the time anyways). Highly recommended for children interesting in computing!

iterance 1y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Built a tape drive and bootloader to load programs off it & everything...
andrehacker 1y ago
>> One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements of Computing Systems" >> by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a 4-bit CPU in Minecraft. You confused me there, the book doesn't cover Minecraft, you did that yourself after reading the book, got it. The book is absolutely fantastic, it is the basis for the "From Nand to Tetris" courses: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/ I haven't digested it in full and with a title like that and the boring cover I always have to scramble to find it when I got a few minutes (What is that "Nand to Tetris" book called again?)
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Funny, I bought that book and studied it because I heard about it in a Minecraft video. Was that you? Nand2tetris helped me land my first programming job.
- cosmic_quanta 1y ago
  It was not me! Maybe we watched the same video though? I can't recall who or what gave me the idea
  - sram1337 1y ago
    Just wanted to say I think we all watched the same video! I remember doing this one summer in high school
kqr 1y ago
> (which I don't think existed at the time anyways) This surprised me at first because I remember using Python to create Minecraft maps early on, or at least in the beta. But it seems like redstone was added in the alpha, and the earliest commits of pymclevel (which I think I used) also dates back to the alpha. So there might indeed have been a time window of a few months in which redstone was available but not tooling for creating maps.
- cosmic_quanta 1y ago
  I remember starting playing Minecraft Beta, that was around 2011 maybe? Even if tools to programmatically create maps were available, I wouldn't have known how to program. So this is more about my lack of knowledge of tools of the time.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

iterance 1y ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Built a tape drive and bootloader to load programs off it & everything...

andrehacker 1y ago

>> One of my fondest memories was buying the book "The Elements of Computing Systems" >> by Nisan and Schocken, and implementing a 4-bit CPU in Minecraft. You confused me there, the book doesn't cover Minecraft, you did that yourself after reading the book, got it. The book is absolutely fantastic, it is the basis for the "From Nand to Tetris" courses: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ https://www.nand2tetris.org/ I haven't digested it in full and with a title like that and the boring cover I always have to scramble to find it when I got a few minutes (What is that "Nand to Tetris" book called again?)

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Funny, I bought that book and studied it because I heard about it in a Minecraft video. Was that you? Nand2tetris helped me land my first programming job.

cosmic_quanta 1y ago
It was not me! Maybe we watched the same video though? I can't recall who or what gave me the idea
- sram1337 1y ago
  Just wanted to say I think we all watched the same video! I remember doing this one summer in high school

kqr 1y ago

> (which I don't think existed at the time anyways) This surprised me at first because I remember using Python to create Minecraft maps early on, or at least in the beta. But it seems like redstone was added in the alpha, and the earliest commits of pymclevel (which I think I used) also dates back to the alpha. So there might indeed have been a time window of a few months in which redstone was available but not tooling for creating maps.

cosmic_quanta 1y ago
I remember starting playing Minecraft Beta, that was around 2011 maybe? Even if tools to programmatically create maps were available, I wouldn't have known how to program. So this is more about my lack of knowledge of tools of the time.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]