Dave McGuire wrote: On Sep 11, 2006, at 7:23 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: This is a good idea. One can put together, using wire-wrap or point-to-point soldering, an 8752-based machine in an hour or two. Five chips, only one of which is a 40-pinner. Burn a copy of the well-known 8052AH-BASIC into it and you've got yourself quite a neat little machine. The BASIC interpreter has excellent I/O capability, interrupt support, and even floating-point math. If anyone wants to do this but lacks the stuff, I have 8752 chips and the means to program them. And the BASIC interpreter, of course. -Dave I agree with dave. But would add that some of the smaller PIC devices are also easy to work with and cheap. And there are several one line tutorials, as well as lots of supporting literature. Buy a couple of issues of Nuts and Volts to get started. And for a beginner, there is a nice book "Programmable Logic" that takes you through several of the basic I/O devices using simple logic interfaces, to demonstrate how easy they are to use and understand. I just found one on eBay for 99 cents, worth the price for getting started. Much more expensive, but Elektor did an outstanding beginners book on computers. Still available, but by time you import it, you're looking at $50 +. Billy