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

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.

Mike’s Tube Computer MK3 packs 460 vintage vacuum tubes into a working 8-bit machine that makes computing visible.

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 ...