Talk Of Building A Computer...

<The main memory of the DEUCE was built form mercury delay lines of 1024 <bits, and the 1024 bit shift register chip had just become available. <The connection was obvious and we spent hours discussing the rebuilding <a TTL version of DEUCE, for which he still had the logic diagrams. Alas <the project was never completed but I have dreams of doing it one day. With current parts the Turing machine could almost be practical/useful as it would be easy to provide enough memory to simulate a very long tape and enough speed to transverse it quickly. It's been a long time since I've looked at that machine. <Take the idea even further : the technology exists today to build most <if not all first generations machines on a single chip. Indeed I wonder <if an FPGA might not be able to be reconfigurable to build many of these In most cases yes. Some are quite simple when reduced a logical description. The PDP-8 has seen this treatment many times using the 6100. 6120 and even gate-arrays. Allison