2 Nov
2005
2 Nov
'05
11:42 a.m.
Brian Wheeler wrote:
On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 14:16 -0500, Sridhar Ayengar
wrote:
Do they still use the -8 architecture?
Peace... Sridhar
der Mouse wrote:
We had to do something similar in our hardware design course. We had a
choice. We could actually etch boards and solder sockets, breadboard it
or simulate it. We had sixteen banks of sixteen locations, four bits
each. And we didn't have branch instructions. Only relative jumps.
Most (all but 5?) students simulated it. I breadboarded. (I hadn't yet
learned soldering then.) One guy soldered it. Probably made a pretty
good souvenir.
Peace... Sridhar
I took a hardware class where we (each team of 2 students) had to build
a PDP-8 using PALs, some 74xx chips, a bit of Static RAM, and a ton of
wire wrapping. The final exam consisted of the instructor breaking each
machine in 5 different ways and we 3 hours to fix it. That was a pretty
cool class.
I hear they use FPGAs now in the class...kids these days. >I
guess nobody even considers building a computer from scratch. :(
[...]
Wasn't there an article a looong time ago about a fellow who built
his own CPU from TTL parts in BYTE or Microcomputing?
I dunno about that, but I once did just that. I took a digital
hardware design course, and as a term project I breadboarded a little
4-bit computer. (I think the whole class did likewise, but it was long
enough ago that memory is fuzzy.) Only 16 words of memory, and 4-bit
words at that, with 4-bit opcodes - not a terribly powerful machine,
but an extremely instructive one to build. All TTL; the most
complicated building block was a 4-bit ALU chip, a 74181 I think.