roomthily

Colossus MK. 2, Bletchley Park (James Pegrum, peggyjdb)

via The Brothers Brick

Digi-Comp II: First Edition (rolling ball binary digital mechanical computer)

a modern, fully-operational recreation of the Digi-Comp II, the classic 1960′s educational computer kit. It’s an automatic binary digital mechanical computer, capable of conducting basic operations like adding, multiplying, subtracting, dividing, counting, and so forth. And what’s more, all of these operations are conducted by the action of balls rolling down a slope, directed by mechanical switches and flip flops, and all powered by gravity.

Quad II, 1969 (Robert Mallary)

via Wired

one of the first computer art sculptures. possibly.

atencio:

Modem to the max! (Taken with Instagram)

live one data at a time.

Superhydrophobic droplet logic: flip-flop memory (by hmertaniemi)

Vladimir Lukyanov’s water computer, 1936, “the world’s first computer for solving [partial] differential equations.” 

via Pruned

prostheticknowledge:

The worlds first computer bug

wondergalleryofscience:

Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1947.

OK, this is not the most beautiful collage ever seen. But this bug, found in the computer room at Harvard by technicians searching around for what was wrong with the damn machine *this time, was extracted from the computations that caused its death and taped to a piece of graph paper, carefully labelled and preserved. It was not the first bug to invade a computer, the glowing tubes of which used to attract them with some regularity. But it was the first bug literally documented by becoming part of the document. And it went on to become not only part of the the document, but part of the documentation: we de-bug things, first computers, and now all sorts of things, as our technological metaphors seem to swarm everywhere and get into everything. Not unlike, well, bugs.

(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)