Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

Roger, simple gates only, just as a reference.  

As I said, at this point I can't understand how additional gates inside essentially a black box chip with defined inputs and outputs that match an exhaustive truth table, and do not store internal states (as is the case with these early chips), could offer additional control (what you refer to as utility rather than elegance) over the machine, but I'll take your word on it that it will all become clear in the next chapter  

As a black box chip absolutely irrelevant, correct. The shape of your black box is a hack box, is all. I was geeking out about boxes of different shapes.  There's a section dealing with that as well, little further on down. ALU's are my favorite part. Have fun.