On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Lindy Mayfield wrote:
> Someone gave a link to Magic which was a computer built from 74 series 
> TTL chips, and I though that was the coolest thing I had ever seen 
> (well, not counting my first trip to Amsterdam), and then someone sent 
> me this link which is a computer built from relays, and currently the 
> coolest thing I have ever seen.
>
> http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/index.html

In 1950-1950 in Radio Electronics, there was a multi-issue article
on building a computer completely from relays, called SIMON.  Thanks
to a wonderful old public library, I was able to find, and have
lost here somewhere, a photocopy of that.  There were one or two
thin little books that were published a bit later that referenced
that.  (Google can give you a few clues about this)

A friend of mine, who passed away years ago, was active in computers
in the late 1950's and beyond, put me onto this and had collected
some of the bits and pieces to build one of these, but it was never
completed.

Someone asked me for copies of that perhaps half a decade ago, with
the goal of building one of these, but I never heard from him again
and don't know whether he was able to finish it or not.


Going wildly another direction, I thought it would be fun to recreate
a Burroughs 5000 mainframe in a single FGPA chip, along with a
couple of simms for "silicon tape drives".  Someone else I knew
decades ago had worked at Burroughs at that time and had lots of
the original paper documentation.  I thought it would be great fun
to have a mainfame packaged inside a kitchen match box, running
ALGOL a hundred thousand times the speed of the original.
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