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A comment on Throbac: THrifty Roman numeral BAckwards-looking Computer.

Re:Throbac: THrifty Roman numeral BAckwards-looking Computer by schlauerfox on Friday November 01, 2024 @11:48AM (#42018156)
How can they only have one low resolution picture and only pictures of the outside?? What display tech does it use? I can't imagine there are Roman Numeral Nixie tubes. https://www.kuenzigbooks.com/pages/books/28672/claude-e-shan... I see Clear Lower, Clear KBD, Clear Upper. 7 'digits' display, but wow if anything needed a manual...
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Re:Throbac: THrifty Roman numeral BAckwards-looking Computer by roywiggins on Friday November 01, 2024 @12:44PM (#42018828)
The document is available on IEEExplore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5311583

I've reproduced here: https://pdfupload.io/docs/13f78f9d

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Re:Throbac: THrifty Roman numeral BAckwards-looking Computer by schlauerfox on Friday November 01, 2024 @12:57PM (#42019005)
Amazing, thank you for the link! There's an entire 'collected papers' on the IEEE website. I'm going to miss my college library accounts now i'm graduated!
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Re:Throbac: THrifty Roman numeral BAckwards-looking Computer by wolfgang42 on Friday November 01, 2024 @01:44PM (#42019555)
After staring at the linked PDF for a while, I think the display was a collection of lightbulbs (presumably behind a mask plate), probably arranged something like this:

     Upper dial   V XV
     (Quotient)    III
  
     Lower dial LLLVV
  (Accumulator) XXX X
                   IIII
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Re:Throbac: THrifty Roman numeral BAckwards-looking Computer by schlauerfox on Friday November 01, 2024 @03:13PM (#42020504)
Yeah, it's a relay counter like a score motor in a pinball machine, but each rotor is different since the I is mod 5, the V is mod2 and the LX is mod 80, directly connected to the lights. The principles discussion is well done. Wow I love old tech documentation! I still don't have a good visualization of what the display 'dial' looks like
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