12 Dec
2008
12 Dec
'08
3:35 p.m.
Thanks for that; I've seen quite a lot of homebrew
machines over the years,
but they always seem to be lacking the back-story of quite why their inventors
built them, or of how they got them working, so that was a good read!
(I've always been curious as to how many homebrew machines 'just work' on
their first try - in the sense that at at least the CPU, enough memory, and
enough I/O comes to life in order to debug things further.)
I did two lo these many years ago. It was 1987, but I still can't
bring myself to think it's been over 20 years. Anyway, they were
part of a larger, multi-processor system. As I recall, they did
mostly just work. But I should mention that I used static RAM
rather than dynamic and I'm sure that helped. I never did finish
debugging the floppy controller though... It was for my master's
and once I had defended, I don't think I ever powered it up again.
And re the other thread, my schematics were all hand-drawn. They
were good enough that my (at that time newlywed) wife was able to
do the wire-wrapping on one of them.
BLS