As the clock struck midnight at the very end of 2019 I decided, over a glass of something sparkling, that I’d set myself a challenge to put out a series of six YouTube videos within the space of one month. This, I thought, seemed timely as I’ve now got my relay computer to the point where it can perform branching operations and therefore run more interesting programs.
Well, somehow I managed to stick to my challenge and although it turned out to be a gruelling schedule below are the six videos I published. If you’ve been following me on YouTube you’ll no doubt have seen these by now but just for completness I’ve repeated them below.
In episode 1/6 I gave an overview of the underlying architecture of my relay computer and dipped in to some of the decisions that led to that architecture:
In episode 2/6 I covered the instruction set (collection of opcodes) which can be used to tell the computer what to do:
Given opcodes are made up of 8-bit binary values they’re not particularly user friendly and so in episode 3/6 I introduced an assembly language which makes it much easier to program the computer:
In episode 4/6 I used the architecture diagram and assembly language from the earlier videos to create a program that can calculate a portion of the Fibonacci series. I then used the list of opcodes to ‘hand assemble’ the program making it suitable for loading into the computer:
Episode 5/6 I took a visual tour around my relay computer as it stands today:
In the last video, arguably the main attraction, I take everything covered so far and put it all together to demonstrate running the Fibonacci program, for real, on my relay computer:
So, all in all, there’s around 144 minutes of content in those videos above but I can assure you it took a lot longer than that to create them so I’m pretty much video’d out for the moment ;) That said though, in February I’m going to have a think about what comes next and what things I’d like to work on for my relay computer in the coming year … I’ll no doubt make a video covering what I come up with and I’ll be blogging, of course, about it here.