Computer designed with 550 Soviet vacuum tubes

With the development of technology, computer logic circuits are shrinking to the nano scale, so even a palm-sized smartphone can outperform a previous PC. In the midst of this, he made a newly designed computer using a vacuum tube that was used 50 years ago. It is Ena Computer (Ena.Computer. Electron tube New Automatic Computer).

Looking at the structure, all 6N3P vacuum tubes consist of the same 5-input NOR gate. The NOR gate logic level is 0V (-20~0.25V) and 10V (9~12V) fanout is 25. In addition, the 6N3P vacuum tube used is said to have an average lifespan of up to 5,000 hours for military use and 500 hours for home use for military and home use. However, these 6N3P vacuum tubes also slept in a Russian warehouse for nearly 60 years, so it is unknown how long the actual lifespan is.

Registers and counters are made from all 6N3P vacuum tube NOR gates, and constitute a D-type flip-flop, an 8-bit ALU, a latch circuit and a buffer circuit. Of course, because a large number of vacuum tubes are used, the heat generated by the enacomputer being used is said to be at a great level. The graphic user interface is an 8-row LED product, and binary display is possible.

The place where Ena Computer was made is an engineer who calls himself Mr. Contact (Mr. Contact or Contact@Ena.Computer). The development of EnaComputer was triggered by meeting Tony Sale, a British electronics engineer who started a project to reconstruct the world’s first programmable electronic calculator, the Colossus, developed in 1943. With this meeting, the developer knew that, besides the Colossus, a vacuum tube computer built 50 years ago was being reproduced, but at the same time, it also learned that the tube computer had not been designed new in 50 years.

The developer decided to develop a new vacuum tube computer from scratch, and initially tried to design with a PC, but from the middle, he proceeded to design with analog techniques such as three-color pens, A4 paper, and correction stickers.

Assembled computer parts took nearly a year to design and build, placing them on the kitchen floor or on chairs and the whole family struggled with the size, power and high voltage risks. The developer succeeded in operating Anacomputer for the first time on May 28, 2021. Related information can be found here.