13 Oct
2013
13 Oct
'13
1:02 p.m.
On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 09:54:06PM +0000, Ian King wrote:
[...]
I remember this book fondly. I had a passing thought:
"Could we somehow
reprint this for the modern age, and inspire young people with this story of
building-block digital technology?"
Then I remembered that this stuff is only minimally
available and teaching
digital design based on TTL is somewhat like teaching fashion design based on
mammoth skins.
One of my favourite books is "50 Great Curries of India". While it contains
recipies, it's not really a recipe book, but a book that discusses the theory
of making curry. The recipies are really just worked examples.
Similarly, I'm working though Don's book. It's not a collection of recipes on
how to combine TTL devices. It's actually a practical course in digital circuit
design, with a few notes on which 74 series chips are suitable for given
problems. I'm about half way through the book and have learned quite a lot that
is directly applicable to cutting-edge FPGA design.
I particularly like the ingenious design used for the bit-paired keyboard that
doesn't even use a look-up table to generate ASCII codes. Given the same task
now, I'd have used an Arduino :)