Several tubes burned out every day.įorget batteries. It weighed more than 30 short tons, took up 1800 square feet, and consumed 150 kW of power. Better bone up on all the techniques you will need and memorise them, because smart people took many years to develop even one of those techniques from scratch.īut even if you assemble a handful of parts reliably, how many parts are needed to make even a basic four function calculator? It’s a challenge of reliability that is best illustrated by ENIAC (or Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer).ĮNIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand- soldered joints. And, a couple of litres of purified liquid Argon, for inert atmosphere. Starting from scratch, you only need a precise oven at 1500C and a decent seed crystal and glass crucibles, as well as X-ray crystallography to determine the right plane to cleave the wafers. 99.9999 per cent pure, with P or N dopant.
Even there, it assumes the child has access to a Wafer of pure Monocrystalline Silicon. But the incremental supply chain for semiconductor fabrication is astonishing in scope.Ĭreating a single homegrown transistor though is possible - transistor fabrication so simple a child can do it. Today, having long invested in supplies like as a semiconductor fab, compilers, even something simple as a lathe (which for anything other than wood is a 20th century innovation), we can knock off millions of these components and so the individual price is in the pennies.
Most people don’t think about the actual amount of money and tools needed to produce exactly one transistor-based computer, power it and program it, to say nothing of the social challenges you’d face trying to build this high-tech machine centuries ago. So you want to build a computer in the 18th century.
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