John Ptak of JF Ptak Science Books unearthed these plans for a paper computer from 1959.
This wonderful cut-away and paste-up template for a digital computer comes to us from the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, volume 2, issue 9 for September 1959.
The PAPAC-00 is a “2-register, 1-bit, fixed-instruction binary digital computer” and was submitted to the journal by Rollin P. Mayer (of the MIT Lincoln Lab). There’s a hunk of me that wants to make this thing really big — cut out the individual pieces and then crash them out to 50" widths, pasted on found bits of cardboard packing from the neighborhood frame shop, and then piece the thing together as the world’s largest pre-1960 1-bit paper computer. Or maybe not.
