CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) Replica
Back in the 1960's and early 70's Bell Labs made some very sophisticated educational kits available to high schools and colleges. Designed for classroom use, they included wonderful manuals written by some of Bell Labs best minds. One of these kits, introduced in 1968, was CARDIAC: A CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation.
so I won't go into a lot of detail here, however I do want to set expectations. The CARDIAC Instructable presented here is not a computer, it's a device to help you understand how a computer works. You the user will:
Along the way you will you will learn the internal workings of a typical Von Neumann architecture computer. Some fairly sophisticated programs can be executed (by you manually remember) on the CARDIAC. Stacks, subroutines, recursion, and bootstrapping for example can all be demonstrated.
I remember working with a CARDIAC in high school. It must have been 1969 or 1970. We were lucky enough to have a couple of keypunch machines at our school, and our card decks of FORTRAN programs were run at the local board of education with only 2 days turnaround (instilled a lifelong habit of thoroughly checking my work before submitting it). So while I was learning the ins and outs of writing programs, the CARDIAC helped me to understand what was going on inside the machine that I was running them on.
