Excel spreadsheets are our daily bread for millions of professionals in finance and accounting departments, but the application is so popular that there are even world championships among the masters who use it and even those who take advantage of it to create amazing works of art.

Excel’s versatility Now it’s surprising that a YouTuber named Inkbox has gone even further and created something mind-blowing: a fully functional 16-bit CPU that can run programs within the tool.

To achieve this, Inkbox used only Excel formulas because it is possible to carry out advanced logical and calculation operations with them. With this, it emulates hardware components of the processor, such as instruction decoders or flip-flop circuits used to store the state of signals, which are key to the sequential logic that is the basis of the processor’s operation.

This creation is not limited to just 16 bit processors, but also to RAMThe “screen” of this unique computer, which is nothing more than a 256 x 256 Excel table, is nothing more than another table with square cells representing pixels, which can also be filled with different colors using conditional formatting.

To create this, Inkbox explains in its video how it created a variant of assembly language called EXCEL-ASM16, as well as a compiler that allows programs coded in that language to be turned into executables that can be run by that CPU.

It is important to emphasize that The processing speed of this CPU is quite limited and is around 2-3 Hz. (ZX Spectrum’s Z80 was at 3.5MHz). Programs run very slowly and we will have to press F9 to update the status of all registries and system components. So no, it can’t run Doom, but someone has already managed to make Excel act as a “screen” to show that game running in the spreadsheet.

Even so, its value is not in the execution of programs, but in its potential use as an educational tool: thanks to this creation, it is possible to better understand how a processor works step by step when running a program.

All components of the project are available on GitHub and we are undoubtedly facing a real miracle This demonstrates the ability of some developers to use Excel as more than just a spreadsheet.

Image | Javier Pastor with Bing Image Creator

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