6 Aug
2006
6 Aug
'06
6:10 p.m.
On Sunday 06 August 2006 08:04 pm, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 8/6/2006 at 7:06 PM Roy J. Tellason wrote:
I have no doubt whatsoever from this point of view now that there was an awful
lot of what I was thinking back then that was totally wrong. And I'm afraid
of someday finding one or more of my old notebooks and confirming that. :-)
Back around 1970 or 1971 I got a hold of my first
TTL data book, which I
still have. And in times when I had some leisure to play with ideas, I
worked my way laboriously through some vague notions of what it might take
to "build a computer". What info I could find back then was mostly of a
very general nature, out of library books and such, and when it came to
actual machine architecture I really had no clue whatsoever. And the best
I could come up with, for something that promised to be vaguely
functional, would've used about 800-900 TTL chips. It's probably a good
thing that I never actually started to build such a thing.
Could that be because you approached the problem of how to build a simple
computer the wrong way? What if your design had been bit-serial, for example?
The PB 250 of circa
1961 used only 400 transistors and 2500 diodes for a 22 bit word and 16KW of
memory. Back when I was thinking about making my own machine, I'd come to
the conclusion that bit-serial was about the only way I could manage it.
I'm not sure if I was even aware of the concept of bit-serial back then.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin