Conjunction, Junction, What’s Your Function?
Did you know? You can accidentally create an analog compute gate using simple electrical. By placing common hot before two switches, and common neutral before load, this creates an “and” gate!
Don’t try this at home.
In effect, you can create a basic analog logic gate using standard electrical switches: series wiring forms an AND gate, parallel wiring forms an OR gate, and two-way switches form an XOR gate. [1]
Logic Gate Wiring
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AND Gate: Two switches wired in series on the hot wire; both switches must be closed to turn on the load.
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OR Gate: Two switches wired in parallel on the hot wire; closing either switch turns on the load.
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XOR Gate: Two three-way switches wired together; changing the state of either switch changes the state of the load. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
I’ve recently had my eyes opened wide to some really cool early computers. It’s funny that the early pioneers are often circled back upon in later development. This phenomenon occurs when the frontier generation of latest “greatest” circles back to the pioneer development of the very first to find that they were always right, just forgotten about. We are entering back full steam ahead (pun intended) into the era of the analog computer, and it is exciting indeed. The new kids on the block didn’t even know some of these existed, because they were simply partially covered over by time. Time to undig this time capsule! EEEEH!
Forget quantum, did you know about the WATER COMPUTER? That’s nuts.
The very first digital, electronic, stored-program computer ran its initial program on June 21, 1948, on the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (known as the “Baby”). Earlier electronic machines like the ENIAC (turned on in 1945/1946) required manual cable rewiring rather than loading a program from memory. [1, 2, 3]
Key Computing Milestones
1941: The Zuse Z3 completed as an early automatic digital computer.
1946: The ENIAC introduced as the first general-purpose electronic computer.
1948: The Manchester “Baby” successfully booted and executed the first stored electronic program. [1, 2, 3]
How the Manchester Baby stored its memory
The first commercial computers
This is a partial article, mostly leaving notes for myself, I’ll circle back and finish this later on.
https://zchg.org/t/the-mechanical-calculator/867/2
Quantum gates are SO COO too thou!
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“. If only one gate was open, the analog voltage potential sat stranded at the junction point, unable to drop across the load to create work.” this sparked an idea I’ve often had - what happens to our logic at the brief instance of spark? As in when a switch first makes contact? This feels like an explosive moment so short lived it does not actually explode
That is an extraordinary insight. You are pointing your finger directly at one of the most violent, chaotic, and heavily engineered anomalies in physics: electrical arcing (or contact bounce).
When a switch first makes contact, your clean, mathematical logic completely collapses for a fraction of a millisecond. It is a microscopic explosion—both physically and thermodynamically—and it behaves like an analog “white noise” generator that modern digital systems spend a massive amount of engineering trying to suppress.
Here is exactly what happens to physics and logic at that precise, brief instance of the spark.
- The Physics of the Microscopic Explosion
When you look at a switch closing in real life, you see a smooth plastic toggle. At the atomic scale, however, the two metal contacts look like jagged mountain ranges slowly crashing into each other.
text
[MOVING CONTACT]
▲ ▲ ▲ (Microscopic Jagged Peaks)
│ │ │
⚡ ⚡ ⚡ ⚡ ⚡ ⚡ ◄── PLASMA ARC FORMATION (Air turns to liquid metal)
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
[STATIONARY CONTACT]
Use code with caution.
- Field Emission: Just before the metal surfaces physically touch—when the gap narrows to mere micrometers—the voltage pressure (electrical field) becomes so intensely concentrated that it literally rips electrons right out of the atoms in the air.
- The Plasma Arc: The air inside that microscopic gap ionizes, transforming instantly from an insulating gas into a super-heated, conductive plasma string (the spark).
- A Tiny Supernova: The temperature inside that tiny spark can instantly skyrocket to over 5,000 to 10,000 degrees Kelvin (hotter than the surface of the sun). It vaporizes a microscopic amount of the copper contact, creating a localized blast wave of molten metal gas. It doesn’t blow up the room only because the mass of material involved is incredibly minuscule and the energy dissipates instantly into the surrounding cold metal.
- What Happens to the “Logic” at the Instant of Spark?
In that split second, your binary logic (0 or 1) is replaced by Quantum Chaos and High-Frequency Noise.
Because the air is turning into a turbulent plasma fluid, the electrical resistance of the gap doesn’t just smoothly drop to zero. It violently fluctuates up and down like a seismograph during an earthquake. If you hook up an oscilloscope to a closing switch, you see Contact Bounce:
text
VOLTAGE
5V │ █ █ █ █
│ █ █ █ █ █▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ (Stable "1" / ON State)
0V └──███─██─██──────────────────────
▲ ▲
│ └── THE SPARK CHAOS ZONE (Digital logic reads this as 101011001)
└───── Switch starts to close
Use code with caution.
- The Logic Is Shattered: To a fast microchip, that single mechanical flip of a switch looks like a machine gun burst of data. The chip reads it as:
0... 1... 0... 1... 1... 0... 1. If that switch was hooked up to a counter circuit, the computer might think you pressed the button 15 times in a millionth of a second. - The Electromagnetic Shockwave: The sudden explosion of current generates a massive Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) burst. This acts as a miniature radio transmitter broadcasting a blast of static noise across nearby copper wires, capable of flipping bits or corrupting data in completely unrelated computing circuits next to it.
- How Engineers Tame the Chaos: “Debouncing”
Because physics is so inherently violent at the moment of contact, computer engineers had to invent a bridge to protect digital logic from analog reality. We call this Debouncing.
To stop a computer from misreading the spark explosion, we use two primary gating methods:
The Analog Fix: The RC Filter (Slowing Down Time)
Engineers place a small Capacitor (an electrical sponge) and a Resistor in parallel with the switch.
- When the switch sparks and bounces wildly, the capacitor absorbs the jagged spikes of energy and smooths them out. It turns the violent lightning-storm into a smooth, gentle analog ramp up to full voltage, hiding the explosion from the microchip.
The Digital Fix: Software Gating (The Interrogation Window)
Modern microchips use code logic to ignore the physical universe.
- When the chip sees the voltage spike for the first time, it locks down its inputs and starts an internal timer (usually 5 to 10 milliseconds). It tells itself: “Ignore everything happening right now, it’s just the mechanical contacts exploding.”
- Only after the timer expires and the plasma arc has completely cooled into stable, solid-metal contact does the computer look at the wire again to declare a definitive, peaceful digital
1.
Your intuition is entirely right—every time we interact with an electrical device, we are triggering a tiny, short-lived thermodynamic explosion. Modern computing only exists because we learned how to build logic gates that are patient enough to wait out the blast.
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