Charlie does not let Lisa near those scary ultra loud crinkly biodegradeable Sun Chips bags.

The Gigatron TTL Computer without a Microprocessor
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The Astro Gamer
Now make a computer with vacuum tubes instead of transistors. Im sure that if you filled out the entire state of Texas with them that you could probably run Tetris.
2 years ago (edited)
1.7K
62


Tj & Ja
lel :)
2 years ago
21


SouthJerseySound
I had a customer that has done it and it was insane.He powered it from his 240 volt line in his house because of the power it took to run.It has massive hound wound transformers and runs a grid voltage of 600 VOLTS.I dont know what he spent but it wasnt the cheapest way to  go thats for sure.But man is the thing bad ass once warmed up and it even uses period correct neon bulbs and nixie tubes.
2 years ago
229


S. S.
Holy hell, we need a video of that monster machine. Just description alone is tech porn.
2 years ago
170


SouthJerseySound
I've got some pictures somewhere but I was in aw of it.The whole thing was about 3-3.5ft deep,4-4.5 ft wide and about the same in height,it was huge although he said it was small by historical standards.It was all point to point construction too.How they wired it is beyond me.Although the son was a engineer in his 50's and his father worked as a engineer at RCA and then in Bell Labs back in their prime. At the time he was telling me how his father helped invent transistors as we know them and to be honest i thought he was full of it.But I later found out he was in fact a tech who worked under Shockley when they invented the first transistor.I really wish I had got to meet the father but he died of cancer right after they finished the computer as a father/son project.I'll see if i can find the pics because the place was like a electronics museum .
2 years ago
89


Dan Kelly
lol it wouldn't need to be that big Tetris is a relatively small program. :)
2 years ago
10


S. S.
Wow, small world, to run into someone who helped more or less shape the entire modern technology! Also, wow #2, that's a big boy computer indeed!
2 years ago
16


Trenzinho da Alegria
Hm yeah it would be something like that... A Transistor-based computer as powerful as an OG Gameboy could be the size of 2 large classrooms. Let's keep in mind that the TX-2 was a Shopping Center-sized computer and it consumed about 8 Megawatts of power and it was about 30% of the Playstation 1's processing power. The TX-2 already featured "*real time" 3D graphics and it's a 1950s computer!  (Disclaimer: "real time" in a sense that very similar to modern computers the graphics were rendered as the game was played, it wasn't an actual real time system. And even nowadays no one uses actual real time systems for gaming..). The frame rate of the TX-2 was about 15FPS meaning that it was below what was necessary for humans to get the illusion of motion but it was still albeit impressive at the time. Ivan Sutherland even made a VR HMD unit for the thing. A 1950s computer with 3D graphics and everything was unbelievable back then. It was almost as exciting as making a huge discovery in physics. TX-2 is the basis of everything we have nowadays. The original CAD machine sort of speaking... The Tallgeese of modern computers.

READ MORE
2 years ago
24


Peter Lamont
The Astro Gamer If he really wants "off the shelf" longevity, this is the only approach i can think of which truly offers that. TO-92 package transistors are the only component that offers true long term availability. So the only solution is to decompose all these fancy chips into TO-92 packages for kits. Otherwise, buy a c=128.
2 years ago
3


Mustakari
That's complete rubbish. No computer ever was the size of a shopping 
center if you don't call a convenience store a center. A computer in the
 50's was nowhere near the capability of the Playstation 1. You clearly 
have no clue what exponential growth means.
2 years ago
8


Peter Lamont
Ya, the early computers had a  very  small instruction set, and only ran around 90khz. Even with machine code they barely matched what a commodore 64 could do in BASIC at the high level. The difference for those computers was that they were designed with multi-user environments and batch processing from the outset. Eniac, it is true, used an enormous amount of energy, and LARC I even more... but transistors could very easily  fit into a very small space. I say that with the previso that you are good at circuit minimization and layout. As an example of this, I cite the HP-9100 calculator. Transistor ALU, memory, registers, and not a single IC. Yet, it fit into a compact desktop calculator. Determined users even added I/O to it. It had CRT output and a linear PSU, and still fit onto a desktop. It was around the same size as the more modern HP-85 computer. I think it's successor was the machine that saw the introduction of magnetic credit cards too. It used them for data storage. Although, it might even have been the 9100.

If one were to reduce the ALU down to diode logic, and latch the output to a shift register, some flip flop configuration transistors, you could have a 1 bit contiguous ALU which  emulated whatever size ALU you wanted with very few transistors...simply using diode logic with 3 resistors, 2 diodes, and some wire circuitry for the shift register. Since the ALU itself could be clocked differently than the rest of the computer by using RDY lines, you can run that small circuit as fast as it'll change states. The ALU action never even needing to change states as well. Finally, a counter could be used to check the ALU is done with the whole mess, and then signal RDY to the CPU to go on to the next instruction. In this fashion, a 32 bit CPU could take up very little space, even without a single 7400 logic IC. I actually plan to build one of these some day.

In addition, I too would offer a minimalist instruction set and a pseudo instruction layer above it. It is way better than having a 4 boards the size of my desktop LCD to fit it on.

I also want to use core memory, and I am experimenting with the concept of printing core memory onto transparent paper(and/or masking copper nano particles as the wire portion). I can then use conductive epoxy to attach the output lines. Then memory density is the resolution characteristics of the printer/stencil.
2 years ago
9


plateshutoverlock
The SAGE system took up a warehouse sized room, was all tube, and it ran a defense system far more complicated than Tetris. It even used CRT displays and light guns (working about the same as a light pen) in it;s control consoles.

I think a couple refrigerator sized cabinets will hold enough car radio type tubes to run Tetris.