Binary addition still fascinates: Wooden adding machine

I took the Introduction to Computer Systems class at BYU earlier this year and learned quite a lot about how computers work on the hardware and low-level software levels. One of the topics, of course, is binary arithmetic. I had a friend who loved to do binary addition on his hands. It always amazed me how quickly and accurately he did it.

Today I ran across this post today which had a link to a video of a wooden binary addition machine created by Matthias Wandel. I think it’s fascinating, so here’s the video: