In the mid-1970s, my dad - then a budding computer scientist, subsequently a math teacher - brought home my first computer: the CARDiac, a Turing-complete, all-cardboard *papercraft* computer that you could write and execute programs on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARDboard_Illustrative_Aid_to_Computation

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/03/rod-logic/making-flippy-floppy

1/