Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824588.

But can you play Doom on it?

Yes, but the framerate is horrendous.

Of course this technology is old, the Aprahulians used similiar techniques to build quite large digital computers around 850 CE[0].*

Of course on problem with such pulley logic is the difficulty of building signal amplifiers. Without signal amplification one must pull the inputs quite hard such that all tension is provided to all stages. The Aprahulians were believed to use elephants for this task.

[0]http://robert.surton.net/cs271/apraphulian.pdf *it is important that readers take careful note of when this article was published

Does the article say when it was published? If I had to guess I would say around late March or early April :)

Seeing the headline, I thought of the same article, which I enjoyed greatly when it was originally published. Good fun.

Calling in your bluff, no such people "Aprahulians"