funny reading Congo nowadays… not a peep about graphene. he talks about blue diamonds and their semiconductor applications but carbon is not even in here
psst!
psst!
[whisper]Diamonds are made of carbon.[/whisper]
how predictable!
funny he mentions the doping process for creating fake blue diamonds in the book… you’d think they’d have that pinned down now
shrug “Fake” is a silly term, when your fake is chemically AND physically identical to the mined version, or even superior ^^’.
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Logic gates made of hedges and peasants
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I have some tube circuit from soviet tank. The tubes are quite small (6N16B-W military ones). I wonder what if it was digital or analog…
For digital tube circuits, decatrons are also quite interesting - it’s a decimal counter made as single device and it counts by moving gas discharge inside lamp. I own a few A101 ones, but still have to do something interesting with them
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About 40 or so years ago there was an article in one of the electronics magazines about building logic circuits using only neon bulbs (NE-2) with resistors and capacitors. I’m still kicking myself for not having had the brains to clip that article.
lol in 1965 GE published a whole manual about electronic uses for neon lamps.
Also: haven’t any of you geniuses ever heard of whippletree logic?
One widely used practical application of such linkages was in the IBM Selectric typewriter (and the IBM 2741 derived from it), where they summed binary mechanical inputs to rotate and tilt the type ball. This type of computer was also used for naval gunnery, such as the MK 56 Gun Fire Control System and sonar fire-control systems.
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Yeah! This was just what I was thinking! The IBM Selectric used a Wiffletree in its type-ball typing system. It had to convert a digital signal from the keyboard, to an analog angle and rotation, and did it with a series of nested levers which basically performed the calculation in real time. This allowed the machine to easily be converted to a teletype system, once connected to phone lines.
It’s pretty amazing to think about how quickly these solutions (which must have been mind blowing at the time) fade into complete obscurity. I wonder if this is just a feature of our novelty-minded capitalism, or if it’s something to do with the way that teachers like me at the college level present “the future” to our students. Hmm.
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I’ve had a number of old military things to play with that have incorporated the small military tubes. they are quite neat although some of them can be challenging to track down information on.
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Where do you get something like that? It is beautiful!
There are some highly-regarded headphone amplifiers that use the 6N16B.
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Nifty! I kind of lost track of that series at some point. Do you know which gazette I should be looking for?
I work at university, and there’s a lot of cool stuff that is thrown out, you just have to know where to look 
Other interesting stuff that I found were pre-WWII Klangfilm tubes from cinema audio amplifiers, nixie tube voltmeters, lots of military avionics (gyroscopes from Soviet bombers, and Soviet clone of Norden bombsight autopilot, sadly without bombsight itself ). I also found weird VFD tube register display from an old mainframe, 50kW brushed motor weighting about 500 kg, and a few machine tools, like lathe, mill and metalworking planer.
And as for the tubes, the interesting part is that they are military spec versions 6N16B-W.
There were also large photomultiplier tubes and monstrous mercury thyratrons rated for 70 kW peak power
Earlier I posted photo of nixie voltmeters at work.
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Digi-Comp. Clones are still available.
I work at a university too, but we don’t have much Soviet war surplus gear around. The university fleet is made up mainly of old Ford vans, not Russian tanks.
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Former Warsaw Pact countries were heavily militarized, and remnants of this can still be seen. At the university where I work there’s still a lot of air raid shelters, civil defense storages and other underground structures 
In the background of a photo I posted previously a blast resistant doors of air raid shelter are visible. It’s in the same building where I work.
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Surprised no one has mentioned the apraphulian computer, first published in an article in Scientific American in the late eighties by A.K. Dewdney. The cord and eyelet logic gates mentioned above are very similar.
http://robert.surton.net/cs160/apraphulian.pdf
Published on April 1st, by the way…
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I’m pretty sure that there are some in the past ten – 65 to 74, roughly. Searching might take a while, though, and this thread is going to close before I can get to it. You might have better luck doing a Google search on the 1632 tech board.
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