9 Mar
2005
9 Mar
'05
10:53 a.m.
It just happens that I am on a riverboat going up the Mississippi
right now. It is fully steam powered. This morning a historian on
the boat stated that this is the most authentic steam boat on the
Mississippi everything is steam powered. He stated that even the
sound system was steam powered. (steam powered turbines generate the
electricity)
At that point I began wondeering about a steam powered computer.
Actualy I guess this laptop is actually a steam powered computer by
that historians definition. BUT..what about a steam powered computer
using steam valves and pistons. That could give you great gain!!!
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 09:24:33 -0800 (PST), Dwight K. Elvey
<dwight.elvey at amd.com> wrote:
--
Jim Isbell
"If you are not living on the edge, well then,
you are just taking up too much space."
W5JAI
UltraVan #257
CAL - 27 #221
From: "Jim
Battle" <frustum at pacbell.net>
Ron Hudson wrote:
...
Hi
Relays work great. They have a lot of gain. Maybe much more
than is needed for a computer.
I've always wanted to build a calculator using marbles that
are feed from a hopper and the addition of a manual lever
to work as a clock ( and additional power ).
Dwight
If the desert island has vines you could make a
rope computer, as
described in a
Scientific American, I don't remember the issue.
It was an april fool's issue, I believe. If memory serves, the island
was called APRLFUL or something like that. The article showed how, with
clever arrangements pullies, toggles, springs and such, inverters and
simple logic gates could be produced. Entertaining enough.
The problem with that "computer" is that the logic gates have no gain.
Each gate has no power supply other than the mechanical power of the
input signals (ropes getting pulled). For instance, say you pull an
input rope of a NAND gate one foot (OK, let's keep it metric) ten inches
:-) and the output rope moves nine inches, so the gain is 0.9. Put N of
these gates in series and the output signal is (0.9**N) of the input
signal. After half a dozen gates, very little is left at the output.
The rope gates had a gain much less than 0.9 -- probably 0.5.
It is the same reason why computers aren't built of of just diodes and
resistors. You can have a gate or two in series, but then the signal
needs to be reconditioned before being applied to the next stage.