Technology Connections
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2023–2026
50:09 · 3.5M views · Oct 14, 2023
Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.
HN points people to it as a deep dive showing how complex logic was built without computers.
11 comments from Hacker News
YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you: this video Fascinating (and insanely impressive) to see how a bunch of switches and stepper motors implement complex logic.
You still use paper. Instead of writing the game in a general purpose programming language you write it using logic gates. You get abstraction and modularity by designing larger components (adders, flip-flops, timers, shift registers) on separate pieces of paper and then including them as named black boxes in a higher-level diagram. The good news for the Pong developers is that most of those larger components were already available off-the-shelf. Common families of these chips, such as the venerable 4000-series and 7400-series logic families, began to appear on the market in the mid-1960's. Edit just to add another bit of nuance . If it still seems like an extremely difficult task without much precedent, I think the lineage of these early arcade games can be traced back through their older arcade siblings: pinball machines. People had been building more and more sophisticated pinball machines over the decades since their inception in the early 1930s. For a look into pinball machines, some of their history, and an amazingly deep dive into the workings of a 1970's model, check out Alec's pinball series on Technology Connections [1]. [1] this video
I would have loved seeing this as a kid. I was obsessed with wanting to build a pinball machine when I was young. At the time my skills only stretched as far as cardboard builds with elastic band bumpers and pencils for flippers, but I got a huge kick out of making different layouts for the balls to travel around. It would be great to see some home made efforts now with so many amazing off the shelf bits of tech and 3D printers. The site is also a nice compliment to the Technology Connections series on old pinball machines [1]. 1. this video
This video from Technology Connections on old mechanical pinball machines does a great job of explaining how a lot of this stuff can be done mechanically. Re: your for loop question, check out how they handle the scoring and I think it'll give you some ideas. this video
Related - Technology Connections has several videos about old pinball machines that showcase how incredibly complex they are, here's the first video: Old pinball machines are amazingly complex this video