Building a digital clock without integrated circuits

Gislain Benoit’s The Clock is an incredible piece of work. Imagine a world where electronics exist but integrated circuits were never invented. How would you make a digital clock?

Every piece in this clock is essential – take one out and it stops working. I can imagine the patience required to build such a machine. If I should Beware the fury of a patient man then, frankly, Gislain scares me a bit.

Check out this list:

1161 Diodes
340 Transistors
346 Resistors
60 Red LEDs
6 Magnetic switches
3 Dual digit displays

Assembled by hand! The overlap alone makes me dizzy. How would I begin to debug such a nightmare? It like “spaghetti code” made real! people who love tidy wires would probably have conniptions if they saw it.