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A project log for Super Micro Relay Computer

Going back almost 200 years, to what could have been the very early beginning of electronic computing!

stefanoStefano 10/20/2019 at 17:330 Comments

Relays finally arrived, and now it's time to start build the computer!


I was liking transparent relays, where you can see the mechanism moving, and I found them at bargain price online. Buying SPDT, DPDT and 4PDT was practically same amount of money, so I selected all of them 4PDT, that will give also a uniform looking. Moreover 12V DC was the minimum available, and I’ve seen that this is a pretty common choice among other implementations. Looking at them afterwards they seems similar to the Harry Porter’s ones!

I bought around 60 of them, hoping even to spare few with 8bit implementation... In reality I might spare even more realizing at least the first version with 4bit word lenght: easier to assemble, to debug, and anyway reaching all goals of the project, and "expanding" it later. I will decide building it. Anyway the design allows for the word to be any multiple of 4bit (e.g. 8, 16, 32 and even 64 bits) since there is no delay accumulation increasing the word size.

The relays number in this moment do not account for the memory. For which I will probaly buy a different type (trough hole) for easyness of assembly with condenser (if the current design will work).


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