srimech

I'd say maybe indie developers.

'Maker', to me, means the culture that started with O'Reilly's Make magazine, Maker Faires, and the subsequent culture that grew around it, which concentrated mainly on making physical things, rather than software.

Not just revenue, but 'products'. Maker, to me, means someone who makes projects, not necessarily things for other people to consume.

The variety of memory used for computers is amazing, and I find it a lot more interesting than the history of the CPU. CPU architecture is very diverse, but physically tends to be just different configurations of a few physical elements - relay, valve or transistor.

Memory had cathode ray tubes, mercury delay lines, dekatron and selectron tubes, core store, core rope, magnetic drums, tapes and discs, magnetostrictive delay lines, magneto-optical discs, and probably many more I don't know about, not counting the write-once formats like punched card and tape.

It can run on steam if you like; it just needs one rotating shaft as input power. I did have the first version hooked up to a model steam engine, shown at the end of the video here: http://www.srimech.com/turing-machine-and-maker-faire.html

The infinite tape requirement is a bit difficult to fulfill, but that's true of the silicon implementations as well.

I wouldn't call that a mistake on your part; it's over-use of capitalization in the headline.

I used to work in a company which had "a culture that enforces a library-like environment on an open floor plan" as indicated (it wasn't a written rule, just the way the culture worked). I found it extremely stressful and depressing, so wasn't working well, and ended up quitting as soon as I could.

I'm now in an open-floor office in which people talk a lot and interrupt me when it's necessary, and I'm a lot happier and more productive.

"Now maybe you're different than me" is probably the most important phrase in there.

I quit the co-working place I was working out of and went to work in the public library instead. It was free and their wifi was more reliable.

I have my SCAD files on github. It seems wrong to me to have a build result (the .STL file) under version control though.

It calculates a cellular automata called Rule 110 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110) which is very difficult to code for. I've seen a paper which shows a method for coding any Turing machine into rule 110, but most of it is beyond my mathematical ability at the moment. So far as I know nothing resembling a normal compiler exists for it.

It's actually much simpler to make a mechanical implementation of rule 110 directly, but Turing machines are more widely recognised.

That's mine. It's a physical implementation of a 5-symbol, 2-state Turing machine which was shown to be universal by Wolfram. If it were perfectly reliable (it isn't) and had an infinite tape (it doesn't) then it would be universal. Going to the extremes of low symbols and states makes it extremely inefficient in terms of code density, if you can apply that term to a Turing machine. The shortest program I've been able to write for it, doing unary subtraction of 3 and 2 would take about 60 hours and need a tape three times longer than I have.