[GTALUG] OT: From Nand to Tetris MOOC

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Alvin Starr <alvin at netvel.net>

| Or you could try this
| https://archive.org/details/howtobuildaworkingdigitalcomputer_jun67
| They has this book in my high-school library and it sort of got me hooked.

That book is pretty misleading.

It produces a box with lights.  And electric combinatorial circuits to
do adding or subracting of 4-bit numbers (as far as I can tell).  And
switches for memory.

You, the operator, must execute the program.  And choose the memory
locations.  And load or store values.  Etc.

(In about 1963, I built very limited adder with similar technology.  I 
even made the switches myself.  Very crude.  I kept asking adults "what is 
a computer?" because I didn't know if I'd built one.  None of them had 
answers.  How much easier this would have been if there had been the 
internet.)