6 Aug
2006
6 Aug
'06
5:04 p.m.
On 8/6/2006 at 7:06 PM Roy J. Tellason wrote:
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.
Cheers,
Chuck