Tag Archives: flip-flop

October 30, 2016

Sideband #61: Tock

relays You’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, right? The tick to finally tock? (My clock is — as usual — running a bit behind; this should be #62, but that’s another story.) Today’s tale involves electro-mechanical logic! Computing with relays rather than solid-state gates.

Rather than the tick-tock of a mechanical clock, the tock-tick of lots and lots of relays! Aisle after aisle of racks of relays, many thousands of them all clicking away like chattering insects. That’s what is (or was) inside some of those windowless buildings found in every neighborhood with local phone service.

However, today the focus is quite a bit smaller…

3 Comments | tags: binary logic, boolean logic, electro-mechanical, flip-flop, full-adder, half-adder, inverter, logic, logic gate, PBX, relay logic, telephones | posted in Sideband

November 12, 2015

Logically Speaking

By Wyrd Smythe

ttab adder full If it hasn’t been apparent, I’ve been giving a bit of a fall semester in some computer science basics. If it seems complicated, well, the truth is all we’ve done is peek in some windows. From a safe distance. And most of the blinds were down.

I thought we’d finish (yes, finish!) with a bang and take a deep dive down into the lowest levels of a computer, both on the engineering side and on the abstract logic side. When they say, “It’s all ones and zeros,” these are the bits (in both senses!) they mean.

Attention: You need to be at least this ━▇━ geeky for this ride!

6 Comments | tags: adder, AND gate, binary, binary logic, calculation, calculator, computer chip, flip-flop, full-adder, half-adder, logic, NAND gate, NOR gate, NOT gate, OR gate, transistor, XOR gate | posted in Computers