homebrew 'puter project (was: 8008?

On 11/16/2005 at 12:56 PM Roger Merchberger wrote: I know I'm probably suffering from something akin to USB-itis, but even "slow" serial busses are pretty darned fast now and I really like not having to lots of traces for bus transceivers, etc. I'd be sore tempted to just hang on a USB controller to whatever CPU card I was building and forget about a backplane. I know--it wouldn't be suitable for display in a nice lucite case with plenty of blinking lights! Which reminds me of something that happened within a couple of months of getting my Altair 8800 going. I'd very carefully toggled in someone's 12K BASIC interpreter and gotten it to run and actually execute some small programs. Way cool, I thought. So I invited a co-worker over during the lunch hour to see what I'd accomplished. His reaction was one of unabashed scorn. "THAT'S A COMPUTER?" said he. "I THOUGHT YOU WERE WORKING ON SOMETHING MORE THAN A TOY." The words still sting today. I imagine that if I'd had a 40hp MG set in my living room, or a few CDC 607 tape drives he might have been more open-minded. I suppose he had a point. What I'd spent on getting that Altair and SWTP TV Typewriter going would have bought a big hunk of a Porsche 914 back then. If I were to build a system from chips today, I'd probably relegate all of my I/O devices to some commodity interface, using single-chip microcontrollers where some particular intelligence was required. Leave the CPU free for the heavy computational lifting. Cheers, Chuck