What you see here is what I’m calling a ‘brick’ of relays. I was so excited when this arrived. My nice heavy, dense, bad ass box of relays. This is just a small number of the total we’ll need to do the whole computer but it is enough for the first part which is the prototype of one of the bits of the ALU.
I bought 100 since that got me the best discount but even at $0.85 each, that’s still some money! But now things feel more real and less theoretical. This is certainly a motivator to get moving forward on actually building something.
I plan to put a bunch of them together to build a one bit adder next. This will show me that this is possible and also we can measure the current drops (if any) as we move along the circuit.