21 Oct
2007
21 Oct
'07
5:43 p.m.
That was the first one I had - the overlays inside were, IIRC, printed
tissue paper.
Me too. I still remember how I would forget that they were not
symmetric, so if you put them in backwards the separators between
the output values and the plastic separators between the lights
don't line up.
Mine
died of corrosion on the contacts, and was (regrettably)
trashed, I'm pretty sure.
I remember the contacts weren't great on the best of days. I think my
step-mother threw mine out when she decided my room was too messy.
:-( My only real complaint with it as a teaching tool was
that even though
I did all the projects, there was no abstraction of the underlying
concepts presented.
I agree. They also didn't do a good job of clarifying that the
device only implemented combinatorial logic. As I recall, I got
it before the idea of a stored program really clicked with me.
Unless I missed it, they didn't have a discussion in the manual
that said, this "computer" does this, but real computers also
have memory that stores not only data, but instructions too.
BLS