A hobbyist known as Mike has built a functional 8-bit vacuum tube computer small enough to mount on a wall, using surplus eastern bloc double-triode tubes. This is not a museum piece or a funded research project. It is a working home computer built by one person.
The machine runs a von Neumann architecture with 16 instructions and a NOR-gate logic design, the same approach NASA used for Apollo-era hardware. It drives an ex-British Rail flip-digit display and runs a control panel for an airship simulator game. Modern components handle I/O. Full schematics and documentation are at thetubecomputer.com, and the architecture section alone is worth the visit for anyone who wants to understand how NOR-based logic scales from Apollo to a living room wall.
What makes this worth reading beyond the headline is the engineering tradeoff detail: why NOR gates, why these specific tubes, and how the instruction set was constrained to 16 operations without losing general utility. Mike has also been nominated for the 2026 Hackaday Retrocomputing Challenge. Watch that outcome.
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