Tales of collecting 5

I first "discovered" Boolean logic and logic gates in the form of switch logic, implemented with relays, when I was in grade school in the mid-1950s. I built simple relay logic circuits and flip flops. This experience came in handy in high school for fixing pinball machines!

I soon realized the "need for speed" and, even more important, reliability, which led me to electronic logic, using vacuum tubes and diodes. Eventually, transistors became commonplace enough to be the basis of my logic experiments.

But it quickly became clear to me that I would need more gates than I was likely to build myself to do any real computation.

In college in the early 1960's, I discovered the IBM 1620 computer, and started to program it, first in FORTRAN, then in machine language, then in assembler. I was hooked. ;-)

The following link is to a recent magazine article bemoaning the fact that kids today have very few "ways in" to how things actually work. (It spends some time describing and discussing the Digi-Comp plastic logic trainer, too.) http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=51200678

- Michael