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I imagine it would be easier for me to build the simulator than to make it do anything of interest.
[0] https://minivac.greg.technology/manuals/1961-minivac601-book...
Steam engine concepts were already there before Jame Watt, logic by electrical circuits was already there before Shannon. People provide incremental guidance for the change, like river banks do to the flow of the river. No single part of the river brought the river upto that point.
"Before microchips existed, computers were built with mechanical relays." Should probably say something about vacuum tubes as well!
And discrete transistors. Now that my curiosity is piqued, I found this nice timeline: https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/ It looks like transistorized computers were dominant at the point when integrated circuits were introduced.
(are those knife switches in the upper right?)
Relay computers must have been pretty loud with all those clacking mechanical switches.
When you attach a name as inventor of something, it sounds as if the whole concept was borne by them, which is not true. All "inventors" and "great leaders" are only carriers of incremental change, which sometimes marks a milestone for a series of changes done by their predecessors or the context. Steam engine concepts were already there before Jame Watt, logic by electrical circuits was already there before Shannon.…
For that incremental change, the name of its inventor is appropriate.
However, you are right that too frequently people fail to distinguish what was new and what was old in an invention, and they misleadingly attach the name of the inventor/discoverer to the entire big system or theory, not to the small features that are truly new.
The inventors or discoverers are frequently guilty of this themselves, by failing to properly acknowledge their sources and by making exaggerated patent claims, which nowadays are too frequently accepted by patent offices that do not perform an adequate search of prior art.
Thank you so much everyone, this is something I've worked on for a few years on and off -- I posted about it here in a Show HN a few hours ago [0] The biggest unlock was finding Willy McAllister's excellent Circuit Sandbox [1], which provides the Minivac Simulator's underlying electrical math. I tried so many approaches to simulate electricity (a doomed DIY approach, Falstad, Spice...) but Circuit Sandbox's DC analys…
Feature request: I was wanting for a bit more sound… I mean, when I see "relay computer", I'm heading there for lots of soft clicks.