newbie building a scratch-built computer

The book I certainly recoemnd is 'The Art of Electronics' by Horrowitz and Hill. It's expensive, sure. But I doubt you'll 'grow out of it' quickly. Put it this way, I consider I have some knowledge of electronics (and I trust eome others here agree with that), but I certainly don't know everything in that book. I still refer to it quite often. It starts from the 'what is a resistor' level, and goes on to microprocesors' It's a very 'practical' book, very little maths. There is also a 'lab manual' called 'The Student Manual for the Art of Electroics'. Certainly the second edition [1] contains a design for simple 68008-based microcmputer built on those solderless breadboard things [2]. There's no reason why you couldn't make it on stripboard or by wire-wrap, or... and/or expand it a little. I forget what's in the first edition of the book, maybe an 8085 or z80 baed design. [1] I like the books so much that I bought both editions of both books... [2] Personally I hate those things. Too many unreliable connections, too much stray capacitance. There's so much you can't do with them, you might as well solder the stuff up from the start! Thinking about it, I would suggest making youre first homebrew somputer using a normal microprocessor. You can get some experience of TTL circuitry my making interfaces for that. When you've got said experience, you will probalby be ready to have a go at ddesigning a processor. If/when you get that far, you might want to read some of the technical manauls and scheamtics for minicomputers, etc. Not to copy such a design gate-for-gate, but to see how things were done and learn a few tricks. I remember I learnt a lot from reading the CPU manual for the Philips P850 and then the one for the DEC PDP11/45 (Knowing what I do now, I'd not recomend starting with either machine, but it's what I had...) All I can asy is that I don't have any qulaifications in computing, electrical enginering or electronic engineering, and I've designed a simple processor. It's _possible_ I'm not sure how much good it will do you. Certainly the courses over here (UK) seem to have little, if any, hardware or machine code programming in them. But perhpas I've just been unlucky... TO be honsest, I doubt you'll get it all done in a year. This doesn't mean uoi shouldn't start, of course, and to be honest, I would consider what you learn from this to be a lot more valuable than the end product, and of course you'll be learning all the time so you will have something to talk to the interviewer about :-) I know that if _I_ was interviewing somebody I would be impressed if they were in the process of designing/building a computer., sicne I would realise all the practical stuff they must have picked up on the way. I've never overheated a chip by soldering it... But the real advantage of using sockets is that you can, say, pull a chip and force the pins to high and low states. You can pull your processor , ROM and RAM chips and check for shorts on the data bus with an ohmmeter. That sort of thing. One other point. Use decoupling capacitors. At least 1 0.1uF between power and ground close to each IC. That may be overkill, but I can assure you the cost of some disk ceramic capacitors is a lot less than your time in finding a nasty glitch. I speak from bitter experience here. -tony