Arty computers

[Jim Battle]

woodelf wrote:
> Chuck Guzis wrote:
>>
>> The old GE machines with the "Thousands of Operations Per Second" 
>> analogue meters were kind of neat too. 
> So just how does one construct such a meter?

One way: pick off some signal that fires once per instruction execution 
-- say some signal that occurs in a particular decode phase of the 
logic.  Buffer it and send it through a simple RC filter, which feeds 
the meter.  Add a pot to scale things properly.  The more instructions 
executed per second, the more pulses per second, the higher the average 
voltage put out by the filter.  You might even be able to skip the RC 
filter since the meter has inertia.