How to make everything
Sometime last year, I was browsing around YouTube, when I stumbled upon a series of videos named “how to make everything”. They had one about making chocolate, another about making a suit, and so on.
But rather than just go out and buy the ingredients, the guy tries to actually make all this stuff from scratch, from the raw materials. Like, for the chocolate video, he actually flew all the way to South America and actually harvested the cocoa beans personally, and went through the whole process of fermenting, drying and roasting the beans. For the suit, he actually flew to Texas and personally picked cotton for, like, a day, and then spent another day spinning it into thread, and so on.
Making glass is easy, right? You just take some ordinary beach sand, make it really, really hot, and it becomes glass. Everybody knows that. But this guy actually tried to do it! And guess what? It ain’t so easy. Sand has impurities in it, which you really want to get rid of first. It’s difficult to get it hot enough for long enough that all the tiny air bubbles rise out; otherwise you end up with very opaque glass. In fact, you need to add a bunch of additives to make good quality glass. And did he go to the shops and buy those additives? No, he tried to extract them out of rocks laying around on the ground — an entire other project in its own right!
Seeing this random dude who isn’t an expert in anything trying to actually grow wheat and turn it into real, edible food, or try to shear a sheep and make wearable clothes out of its wool really impressed me. So many people think they understand these things, but how many of us have actually tried to do any of this stuff? As this guy proved, it’s way harder than you think!
The spark of an idea
Seeing all this got me thinking. I’ve been telling people for years — decades! — that I know how to design and build a computer from scratch. I started computer programming when I was 9 years old. Sometime after that, I discovered that a page in my copy of “The way things work” was actually a blueprint for making a binary full adder, a crucial component of any computer system. I’d ignored that page for years because I didn’t understand what it was supposed to be. But now, suddenly, I understood!
After that, I began hunting through library books, learning what I could about digital circuit design. By the time I reached college, I was pretty sure I knew how to build a computer myself. I even spent many hours in my bedroom, drawing circuit diagrams in Deluxe Paint IV, of all things. (Not the ideal tool for that job!) Since then, I’ve only learned even more about the inner workings of computers.
But let’s be honest here. It’s really, really easy to say you know how to do something. It’s a different matter to actually do it, isn’t it? Isn’t that the entire point of the HTME series? Well, it turns out the only way to prove you can do a thing is to actually, you know, do it.
I’ve been saying for years that I “know how” to build a computer, and in the back of my mind I always thought I might actually do it one day. But here was a guy on YouTube actually doing stuff for real — and filming it for our entertainment, no less! If this guy can manage to fly half way around the world to gather rare ingredients, what the hell is stopping me from building my own computer?
What am I waiting for?
Seeing the HTME series of videos finally gave me the push to actually look into the feasibility of doing something.
The story so far
All of this happened sometime back in 2018 — around about May, I think. A lot has happened since then, which I intend to eventually chronicle here. Depending on how much time I have.