It is quite amazing that the Elliott company already managed to fit their 1960s computer into a shoebox-sized footprint. As computers had not yet settled on the common 8bit word size back then the Elliott 900 series are rather exotic 18bit or 12bit machines. The 920M was used as a guidance computer for European space rockets in the 1960s and ’70s but also for navigational purposes in fighter jets until as late as 2010.
Opening up the innards of this machine reveals some exotic quirks of early electronics manufacturing. The logic modules contain multilayer PCBs where components were welded instead of soldered onto thin sheets of mylar foil that were then potted in Araldite.
To get the computer running [Erik Baigar] first had to recreate the custom connectors using a milling machine. He then used an Arduino to simulate a paper tape reader and load programs into the machine. An interesting hack is when he makes the memory reading and writing audible by simply placing a radio next to the machine. [Erik Baigar] finishes off his demonstration of the computer by running some classic BASIC games like tic-tac-toe and a maze creator.
More Stories
via Hackaday: Building Experience and Circuits for Lithium Capacitors
via Hackaday: Swapping Batteries Has Never Looked This Cool
via Hackaday: Stripping GoPros To The Bone For Model Rocketry