I read that a few months ago and was incredibly upset when I turned to the last page.
Such a fun read, requires no more than early college math (maybe not even that), but dives deep into some really, really interesting and quirky problems.
He is known sometimes, when walking past book shops, to see if there are copies of his book. If there are he sometimes surreptitiously signs a few and puts them back on the shelf.
If ever I write a book I'd find that a very tempting thing to do. I have published (note that I am the publisher, not the author) and am tempted to get the author to sign some of them that we place in shops, just because.
This is fascinating because it's such a relatable physical demonstration of real physical CPU concepts such as overclocking, die size, voltage, reliability, tunneling/leakage, architecture, multiple cores, etc.
For any kid out there who's thinking "why can't they just make CPUs faster", this is a great way of explaining why. It's hard, and as you push the limits, reliability goes down. So the challenge is in keeping reliability high enough to be acceptable, and performance increased.
> Delay line memory is a form of computer memory, now obsolete, that was used on some of the earliest digital computers. Like many modern forms of electronic computer memory, delay line memory was a refreshable memory, but as opposed to modern random-access memory, delay line memory was sequential-access.
> Analog delay line technology had been used since the 1920s to delay the propagation of analog signals. When a delay line is used as a memory device, an amplifier and a pulse shaper are connected between the output of the delay line and the input. The memory capacity is determined by dividing the time taken to transmit one bit into the time it takes for data to circulate through the delay line. Early delay-line memory systems had capacities of a few thousand bits, with recirculation times measured in microseconds. To read or write a particular bit stored in such a memory, it is necessary to wait for that bit to circulate through the delay line into the electronics. The delay to read or write any particular bit is no longer than the recirculation time.
I used to do the same thing in my youth. The dominos have a rather low reliability and I'd always run out before I could set up a useful circuit. Resetting your design to test it with different inputs can make the whole thing a real test of patience. Now days when I want to make esoteric computers I simply play minecraft.
If you are particularly interested in domino logic and adders, baddox posted this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SudixyugiX4), petercooper posted this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNuPy-r1GuQ) by Matt Parker (the same guy in this video) and I documented a 2-bit build I did (http://imgur.com/a/qq7Kl).