A Tiny Microcontroller Build Revives Forgotten Computing History
Long before digital computers became the obvious choice for tackling difficult mathematical problems, researchers built dedicated hardware that could outperform them. These specialized machines weren't programmable in the modern sense. Instead, they were designed to solve a narrow class of number theory problems as quickly as possible. KB Sriram recently recreated one of these unusual devices using modern microcontrollers, showing us why number sieves remained useful for many decades before finally disappearing.
Called A Tiny Sieve, the project is based on an electronic number sieve design from 1982. The original design used banks of ROMs and counters to reject impossible candidates at extremely high speed before handing the remaining numbers to a conventional computer for more expensive calculations. Sriram's implementation replaces each ROM-and-counter pair with an ATtiny412 microcontroller. Thirty of those microcontrollers plug into a shared backplane, while an RP2040 configures the system, generates the clock, and verifies any candidates...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to www.hackster.io. To see the full text click HERE
