16 Mar 2025 - 3 min read
Well, it’s only taken 12 years but my computer has finally reached a major milestone - Turing completeness. The architecture of my computer has, of course, been Turing …
09 Mar 2025 - 5 min read
Controller Design: LOAD, STORE & INCXY Instructions
For a while now my computer has been missing its final three instruction classes … and two of them are ‘up there’ alongside branching in terms of overall …
05 Dec 2022 - 8 min read
Controller Design: MOV8, MOV16 & MISC Instructions
Way back in 2019 I discussed how you can’t ‘half design a PCB’ and that, as a result, my controller cards already have all the required functionality laid …
27 Nov 2022 - 10 min read
Assembling an assembler - token scanning
In the last episode of this mini-series I explained about how an assembler’s job is effectively to convert a program written in a language a human programmer can …
20 Nov 2022 - 4 min read
Well, what a journey that’s been then … I started work on a clock for my relay computer back in May 2020 and today (20th Nov 2022) this post marks the end of it. …
05 Nov 2022 - 3 min read
Quite a while ago I decided to give up on the tedious wire wrap technique for building my cards. Although it was certainly more authentic and in-keeping with my …
14 May 2022 - 9 min read
Assembling an assembler - overview
To make my relay computer do something interesting (or anything at all) it needs a list of instructions held in memory. Each instruction consists of an 8-bit value called an …
02 May 2022 - 4 min read
So, is fair to say that things have been a bit quiet around here of late … and if you’ve been following my YouTube channel I do hope you haven’t been holding your breath for …
01 Feb 2020 - 2 min read
As the clock struck midnight at the very end of 2019 I decided, over a glass of something sparkling, that I’d set myself a challenge to put out a series of six YouTube …
05 Jan 2020 - 1 min read
In my last post I covered off the full design for the decoder card so all that remains is to get it soldered up and tested. As before I’ve put a video together which …
22 Dec 2019 - 4 min read
Decoder Design: Schematic & PCBs
I’ve almost got everything I need now to get my relay computer to do branching. The hard work of designing and constructing the sequencer and controller units is …
21 Dec 2019 - 1 min read
In my last couple of posts I covered off the full design for the controller unit. As the PCBs have now arrived I can get on with soldering up the cards and giving them a test. …