That’s brilliant. I don’t know who you promised it to, but I’m glad to see it.
The creator of that machine has a website:
http://woodgears.ca
Man…I had this whole late-night coffeeshop session with my friend a couple years ago about how processors work and how bits work and such. Then we decided we wanted to build an adding machine. My idea was much like this (of course, not nearly realized) - great to see it in action and a very nice demo!!
At long last, Joseph Meacham’s dream of a Shaker-built artificial intelligence nears reality. If only such precision-manufactured marbles had been available in the 18th Century, who knows how history would have unfolded? We might even now be living under the watchful maternal eye of an immortal Mother Ann Lee, her consciousness uploaded into an enormous memory bank lovingly crafted of cherrywood, red oak and lignum vitae.
I wonder how long it would take to download porn from a Shaker-built computer.
(I also notice that, according to the video, operating the Angiosperm Engine somehow results in the apportation of small objects. That’s frankly alarming.)
Pretty cool.
I was at a science museum a few years ago and saw a 4-bit binary adder made out of colored water flowing through glass pipes.