The step-by-step, mechanical logic of old pinball machines
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an in-depth look at mechanical logic, and uses it as an analogy for state machines and biological instruction processing.
What it is
Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2024 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends brewdad · 2024-01 · on “Why a toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today (2021)”
I've been watching his videos on a 1970s pinball machine. It goes horribly in-depth (in a good way). Fascinating how much complexity could be managed with the simplest of interfaces. [LINK] [this video]
Cites spaceribs · 2024-01 · on “Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?”
After reading the reason why code isn't a good analogy, the mechanical/analog logic of old pinball machines might be a better example of how DNA processes instructions? Ref: [this video]
Cites wgrover · 2024-10 · on “Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter?”
Yup - the first few minutes of one of Technology Connections' videos on electromechanical pinball machines shows this mechanism in action: [this video]
Cites matheusmoreira · 2025-05 · on “VVVVVV Source Code”
I think it's pretty charming. Games have so much abstraction these days it feels like there's no way to truly understand what it is they're even doing. One can spend months agonizing over the true nature of things and how ideas and concepts relate to each other and eventually distill it all into some object oriented organization that implements not just your game but all possible games. One can also just cycle the game's state machine in a big function, haha switch statement go brrr. Reminds me of the old NES games which would statically allocate memory for game objects, very much in the "structure of arrays" style, they too had game logic just like that. Also reminds me of old electromechan