The homebrew vacuum-tube computer the internet fell for this week reminds us how far we've come.

The registers, counters, 8-bit arithmetic logic unit, ring-oscillator clock, and small tube RAM are all assembled from that single building block, an approach Hackaday traces to the Apollo Guidance ...

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.