Nanotubes have long been touted as the heir to silicon`s throne, but building a working computer has proven awkward.
The breakthrough by Stanford University engineers is published in Nature.
Cedric is the most complex carbon-based electronic system yet realised.
So is it fast? Not at all. It might have been in 1955.
The computer operates on just one bit of information, and can only count to 32.
"In human terms, Cedric can count on his hands and sort the alphabet. But he is, in the full sense of the word, a computer," says co-author Max Shulaker.
"There is no limit to the tasks it can perform, given enough memory".
In computing parlance, Cedric is "Turing complete". In principle, it could be used to solve any computational problem.
It runs a basic operating system which allows it to swap back and forth between two tasks - for instance, counting and sorting numbers.
And unlike previous carbon-based computers, Cedric gets the answer right every time.
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