Long before electricity was a common household utility, humanity had been building machines to do many tasks that we’d now just strap a motor or set of batteries onto and think nothing of it.

The Youtuber Shadowman39 has built a functional, mechanical 8-bit computer with the construction toy for roller coasters and towers K'nex. The machine can process binary numbers between 0 and 255 or ...

Building a simple 8-bit computer is a great way to understand computing fundamentals, but there’s only so much you can learn by building a system around an existing processor. If you want to learn ...