Marbly Heart (Re: Looking for old computer book)

[dwight elvey]

>From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>
>
>At 05:04 PM 3/31/2007, Scott Austin wrote:
> >The idea of using marbles, tilt boards, gates, has been tucked away in my 
>brain to some day emulate **something**.
>
>Google 'pythagoras switch' and watch the videos on YouTube.  :-)
>
>- John
>

Hi
Making the logic elements is easy, that hard part is making a useful
size memory.
Even for the logic, one has to make a system of amplification. A single
marble offsetting a balance isn't useful unless it can be amplified.
My thoughts were to have a mechanism similar to how a teletype
works. Then idea is to have a lever that provides the power ( human ).
It would push a dowel into a location that either had a mable or didn't
have a marble. If there was on there, it would push through to another
lever that worked the marble action one gravity level up where the
next marbles were to provide other action. This way, a single marble
could control the action on many marbles.
Pulling the lever back would allow the selected mables to drop from the
higher level to the bottom level where they would again be used to
drive the top level logic action. Marbles would be feed into a hopper
at the top of the machine to keep things running.
Dwight

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