BRAIN damage!!!! A friend of mine built a 16-bit mini about 30 years ago from 74xx chips and hand-wired boards. Chips soldered to breadboards, and wire wrap wire hand soldered to make all but power/ground connections. The instruction set was Data General Nova. He then added a 3D display controller and made a flight simulator with XY magnetic deflection CRTs.
I built a 32-bit bit-slice CPU about 25 years ago, but never did a whole lot with it, as I'd have to come up with an OS.
Jon
AIEEEE, that's even worse than the all vacuum-tube digital clock! Gasp!
Jon
Jon Elson expounded in news:9YadnTiAlZJ9cRHQnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
I once built an 8-bit computer before computers got personal.
I think I eventually bought the CPU chip as surplus from Poly Paks IIRC (1970's). This one used Intel's 8008 CPU and a whopping 1K of static RAM (8 x 1K). This was Intel's first
8-bit chip. The predecessor, the 4004 required too many chips for my taste (4-bit).8008:
My design wasn't entirely correct: I would spend a half hour or so toggling in bytes with octal switches and a deposit button, and then the furnace would come on and glitch my memory. Being sensitive to hydro glitches, it worked better in the summer months!
It should have had buffer drivers on the data/address bus, but despite the 8008 chip running a little hot, it ran ok. But the proper bus buffers might have added reliability.
The picture shows a keyboard, but i never got around to completing that interface.
The steel cabinet was designed to be similar to the IBM-1130 that I was using at the high school at the time. My father was wondering what on Earth I was welding up.
IBM-1130:
Warren
Now imagine buying a copy of "Windows 7 8-bit" for it!
Jon
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