Self-taught tinkerer demos working room-sized Cold War-era supercomputer with vacuum tubes — takes 15 minutes to warm up and smells like burning dust, 8-bit des

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Watch On The wall-mounted vacuum tube-based computer you see in the video above is apparently the third tube computer Mike has engineered this decade. Previous iterations have sometimes come to an explosive end…

Of course, there have been a number of famous historically significant computers based on arrays of these tubes or valves, which offer similar functionality to the transistors that largely succeeded them. There are plenty of reasons the computer industry moved from tubes to transistors, and then silicon ICs, but enthusiasts aren’t bound by such practicalities.

Mike notes a few drawbacks with vacuum tubes, actually. Most notably, this simple 8-bit computer design needs 460 of these fragile, rather bulky, white-hot glowing tubes to run. Furthermore, these used/old stock 6N3P models only have about a 500-hour operational life, so a few handy spares are required, as is a stepladder to reach the whole array of tubes, which may fizzle out at any time. The tubes run hot, so Mike's computer room is always toasty whether the season makes that a nice thing or not. A fire extinguisher is always kept handy, and the room smells of burning dust.

Performance and capabilities are about as limited as one might expect. Mike notes that starting The Tube Computer (MK3) means waiting 10 to 15 mins after power-on for the machine to literally warm up. This is followed by a mandatory reset to get the tubes into a unified operational state.

DIY modder creates 'heat engine computing device' powered by a Stirling engine

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Reference reading

• https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/pc-building/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
• https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/pc-building/self-taught-electronics-tinkerer-builds-cold-war-era-vacuum-tube-computer-8-bit-design-uses-460-recycled-6n3p-vacuum-tubes-manufactured-in-the-1950s#main
• https://www.tomshardware.com/membership

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