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by musicale 403 days ago
> While there are a number of great CARDIAC simulators out there (see Building a CPU simulator in Python for instance) and even an FPGA implementation (Al Williams - Paper to FPGA) there is nothing like holding and operating a physical device.

"Paper to FPGA" sounds like a cool idea, though the point of CARDIAC seems to be that you perform the operations yourself (by carefully following its flowchart/control specification and manipulating the cardboard device.)
2 comments
andrehacker 403 days ago
FYI, the link to the Al Williams article on DrDobb's website from the Instructables page seems dead but.. Wayback machine to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180306072013/https://www.drdob...

That article has a link to an Excel implementation which allows you to "perform the operations" yourself without having to cut and assemble the computer.

link
earleybird 403 days ago
It give me the concrete basis for "being the computer" that I put to use a year or two later programming assembler on a PDP-8I

:-)

link