Seeing red

[emjay]

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.

Phew... I thought I was going insane there   Yes, I'll be interested to see what these hacks are all about, but when it comes up in the book   I think ALU's will be one of my favourite parts as well... I loved binary arithmetic at college... I love anything procedural. Would you like me to check in after every chapter and let you know my progress, or would you rather I just got on with it? It's just nice to get some feedback from the master  And rest assured I take everything you say on board, just as always 

btw, what software do you use to produce your schems? I don't think the software suite here comes with any software for that.