10 Feb
2000
10 Feb
'00
6:24 a.m.
The really innovative thing about the Elf was that it
was a CMOS part (in a
land dominated by NMOS and PMOS chips) and the timing on the externally
driven DMA cycle was such that you could build a front panel for it that
would use the chip's DMA capability to DMA data into memory. This made the
front panel trivial to build (and hence the $99 price tag).
At that time the only hobbiest CMOS cpus were RCA CD1802 and the
Intersil 6100 (PDP-8 on a chip).
Around the same time sa the ELF article there was the (kilobaud) article
on the 6100 (take a byte out of this) and it's SBC (intersil 6960) that
was also very cheap. The advantage was the 6100 if the user built
interfaces that were PDP-8 compatable you could run all of the DECUS pdp-8
software. The only requred interface for a 4k system was a TTY (asr33)
and you could run FOCAL!
Allison