Don't know where it fits in, but in the early 60s my son Mike and John Conway constructed SAMBA --- don't remember what that stands for, but the B is probably ball-bearings. It was a sort of vertical pinball machine which did addition of one-digit numbers. I especially remember the delay lines, which were very slightly sloping channels which retarded the ball bearings until an earlier operation was completed. R. On Thu, 11 Sep 2014, Dave Dyer wrote:
And how could I neglect both the Enigma machines and Turing's "bombe" devices, which were mechanical computers used to codebreak enigma messages.
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