12 Sep
2004
12 Sep
'04
11:21 a.m.
On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, Ben Franchuk wrote:
Peter C. Wallace wrote:
Memory is a problem, one thing is to have only a little (say 16X12) with
transistors or core. The other thing would be to cheat and black box it with a
memory chip
SMT transistors can be had for around $.01 each, diodes about the same,
resistors around $.005, LEDs are still about $.03.
(Assembly costs would be more than component costs)
Peter Wallace
This gives me a crazy idea of building an all
transistor replica of a simple
CPU (with maybe a serial ALU) on a large single surface mount card (suitable
for framing). Maybe even with SMT LEDs on most of the collector loads - lots
of blinkenlights!
So what about memory? Transistor too?
A PDP-8/S would be a good model to pick from. Note you need a lot of SMT diodes
resistors too.
Peter Wallace