I’ve been poring through old comic books, finding things to use over on Dateline: Silver Age, and I came across this ad:

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It’s from Captain Storm #15, a war comic from 1966 (and yes, it shares a page with the infamous Polaris Sub.) Of course, you expect the things in these ads to be a load of hooey. So I was intrigued, and looked this up to see what kind of crud it turned out to actually be.

Holy cow! What it turned out to be was the Digi-Comp I, a functioning mechanical 3-bit computer made of plastic and a bit of metal. You can read a few facts about it on Wikipedia.

That is incredibly cool. And what’s cooler? You can buy a kit now, though it’s cardboard instead of plastic.

This place, Minds-On Toys, sells a Digi-Comp kit for about sixty bucks. You assemble it, and it even comes with a user’s guide to “programming” it.

Can you imagine having one of these to play with if you were a kid growing up before personal computers?