"This guy built his own CPU and VGA card. The site is in German. Here is the Babelfish translation of the site."
My Hovercraft is full of eels! I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched. Do you waaaaant...do you waaaaaant...to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy? Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait 'til lunchtime.
Re:Babelfish
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0, Funny
Some moderator doesn't know Monty Python. 'Tis a shame!
"Of cohrse vwe ahre French, why ehlse woold I have autreyjis aocxent?"
If I had a single mod point I would pun-ish you!!!
You forgot the best one:
If I said you had a beautiful body...
would you hold it against me?
That has got to be one of the funniest. sketches. evar. I know several of the pythons think that the fish slapping dance (which i have never seen...) is the best, but besides the english-hungarian phrasebook (this sketch), the world-championships in hide-and-seek, the...
Oh my! I just realize (sp?) that I have MP withdrawal. I need a fix of absurdity. STAT!
Re:Babelfish
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epiphani
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Believe me, its not too far off. I just got back a forbidden message from the webserver (im assuming its slashdotted), and after it ran through babelfish, this was the output.
Forbidden
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu-g.htm on this servers.
Abuser: WHAT DO YOU WANT? Man: Well, I was told outside that... Abuser: Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings! Man: What? Abuser: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, maloderous, pervert!!! Man: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I'm not going to just stand...!! Abuser: OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse. Man: Oh, I see, well, that explains it. Abuser: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor. Man: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry. Abuser: Not at all. Man: Thank You. Abuser: (Under his breath) Stupid git!!
Greetings. In your comment you say. "Here is the Babelfish translation of the site." What do you mean by using the word "here"? WHERE is the bablefish translation of the site? I have been clicking links around yor post forever. I have not had the easiest of times navigating slashdot. It almost always links me to somewhere other than where it says. It takes forever to find an original starting point of a post-conversation, or to even locate the article.
Besides, in this day and age, anything this clueful deserves a brownie point or two. If you think otherwise, try working around all the A+ certified ijits (that I call coworkers) for 8 hours.
$$$ to fabricate? Try man-months of fabrication and development time. This guy had to invent his own assembly code, and C compiler.
As an Undergrad in EE I designed a hell of a lot of CPU's. I never built one. In the lab we used the old trusty Motorola 68000 series. Must have been Drexel's 10 week terms or something. LOL
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It's just a matter of coughing up the $$ to fabricate them.
You don't even have to do that. For one of our courses (around 4 years ago) we had to design our own reconfigurable μP and implement on an altera FPGA.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Undergrads at most universities build their own CPUs. It's just a matter of coughing up the $$ to fabricate them.
So what you meant to say was Undergrads at most universites design their own cpus. Using your definition I could go build another Great Pyramid. I just wouldn't have to actually BUILD it, just draw some pictures.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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Excellent points, my words exactly. Mod parent up!
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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I asked a friend of mine studying business, about all the CPUs he's built, but he gave me a funny look, and soon he'll start chasing his master's!
Undergrads at most universities build their own CPUs.
He did much more than just "design a CPU." He also built his own operating system and a basic interpretter.
--
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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Build their own CPUs? Not hardly. Maybe build their own PCs... I think you've got the AOL definition of CPU here ( as in that big box on your desk that isn't the monitor or keyboard ).
Most undergrads (even CS or IS undergrads) are trying to get laid or drunker than anyone ever has.
I suggest you do the same instead of wasting readers' time.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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This guy started posting in April. So far, he's contributed nothing. Maybe soon the novelty of posting to Slashdot will wear off and he'll wander off and quit checking to see if anyone has replied to his posts every 10 minutes.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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Still, I'm impressed.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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hahaha i don't even have an A+, i don't 'think' i know jack shit, but i honestly don't care. if you really think knowing more about computers than the next guy really means more than just that, you are a sad individual indeed...
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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Drexel, eh? News came today that I can graduate next week from the CS program. The only EE course I had to take was intro circuits, which normally has students build simple stufff on a breadboard. Naturally, the term I took it was an exception, which sucks as I dont really know how hard an EE's job can get given the rest of the course was cake. System Architecture (the CS student's CPU course) had us do a simplified MIPS chip in VHDL, but its not the same, especially since I never got mine to work right.
Use an FPGA, and there's no fabrication time, no back-end development time, and the verification time is significantly reduced.
As an Undergrad Comp Eng, I've designed and implemented (some 74xx ICs + several PALs) a similar, smaller-scale design in a 4-week lab project.
The only impressive thing about his cpu is the fact that he only used the 74xx series and eproms. Impressive, because routing between 50+ ICs is a bitch:).
-- Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Re:big deal
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jackb_guppy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
He has done a very nice job in documenting it. That is what is so great about his site.
But doing it is not new...
In 1980 as class project, my lab partner and I took 20 chips and built a 4 bit computer in about 3 hours. The instruction set was based on the 4 bit ALU. We were trying to prove the possiblity of new course for the collage. The course was to take people who wanted to be computer science to get their hands dirty and build a machine. Also taught alot about low and high logic.
My first emulator was for a Z-80A processor and was written in tiny basic on Attena 8085 machine. It had three programs, an editor, a 1-2-3 compiler and the emulator. My college advisor (was also one of the profs in mathimatics and computers) had hours of fun with it.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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What would really be cool is if he could make a c64 that's the same size as a pdp11!
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0, Interesting
As other posters have pointed out, gate arrays are a quick way to get a CPU set up.
However, from what I could read before the site crashed and burned - this guy has done it using EPROM memory to emulate a CPU using logic tables. Probably along the lines of "instruction 2 does these logic operations". Sure, it's slow, but it's quite ingenius and it explains how he's able to easily emulate different CPUs.
No gate arrays, no fabrication. A virtual CPU very similar to the approach Transmeta took (although Transmeta did it all on one chip).
I had to persue other options when they made me take out a personal loan to cover the back tuition from when they sent my Stafford loan back 2 years prior. No... I'm not bitter.
EE is a hell of a lot more than circuits. No word sets me into a fetal position muttering equations faster than "Laplace."
When you actually understand the theory of control, analog electronics, and quantumn theory, you generally regard computer science as a house of cards. It is that simple because you are meant to think of it as simple. It has as much to do with the reality of the situation as high school physics does to general relativity.
For an entertaining evening, get me drunk and discuss how many "theorums" of computer science are not actually proven. You will never trust another security system again.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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For an entertaining evening, get me drunk and discuss how many "theorums" of computer science are not actually proven. You will never trust another security system again.
Hopefully when we start playing russian roulette there is a single player mode we can set it to. You go first.
When you actually understand the theory of control, analog electronics, and quantumn theory, you generally regard computer science as a house of cards. It is that simple because you are meant to think of it as simple. It has as much to do with the reality of the situation as high school physics does to general relativity.
I believe the analogy is flawed. Computer Science isn't inferior or necessarily wrong: it's an abstraction, which is completely different. It's nice that there's so much complexity underneath and that you understand it, but give us a break. I don't know any chemists who look down on cooking.
You will never trust another security system again.
I trust 25 years or more of empirical data in support of current practice and theories. Sort of.:)
I have 40 or so OS's on my network at home. Arcnet, token ring, ethernet, localtalk, omninet, ATM, FDDI... 68k machines (macs, amigas, atari's, NeXT, cisco routers, trs-80 model 6000), a few vaxen, an ARM 610 (apple newton), sparcstations, apple2's. A PDP-11/04. A Intergraph InterPRO 6000 clipper cpu machine (c300). PPC machines (macs, tivo, rs6000). A POWER cpu rs6000. An SGI Indy and DECstation round out the MIPS cpu machines. The 65xx and 68xx are too numerous to list. A few z80 machines. I even have the TMS9900 cpu, in the form or a ti994a. Sadly, only one Alpha Multia, and no OSF to load on it. Still looking for a PArisc. But I know practically nothing.
Excluding isa, pci and agp, how many expansion busses could you name, or would recognize on sight? How many OS's have you used? Tell me, how many platforms were ever made into a laptop/notebook form factor? Better yet, I'll answer that, 4. Name them. I mean, big AC, bring it on... I'm sure you're so much more knowledgeable than I...
I'm not trying to pick a fight, but what concept (beyond the work of Von Nauman machine, Turing, and Shannon) has actually survived 5 years in practice? (A lot, I know, but less than you would think.)
I remember a time before Object Oriented programming. I remember when 640K was REALLY enough for everyone. Look back in your own lifetime, see the complete upheavals in the field of computer science, and tell me that we have 25 years of ANYTHING with a straight face.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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Yes, but did you design your own CPU?
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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I want to be like you when I grow up. Okay, well maybe I would rather see the Sun and get some pussy. Nevermind.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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What would really be cool is if he could make a c64 that's the same size as a pdp11!
Could you imagine a beowulf cluster of pdp11's in the former Soviet Russia?
All the basic algorithms are very similar. In fact, the latest edition of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (the computer science book) still has information on optimizing tape operations! The algorithms used for operations like random number generation, searching and sorting are the same ones used in mainframes and minicomputers; granted, they have evolved to take advantage of more processing power (random number generation in particular) but the basic concepts remain the same.
There have been very few "complete upheavals" in computer science, just as there have been very few "complete upheavals" in EE in the last 50 years. Computers are faster now, but the algorithms they execute are the same.
Hmm, medicine must be bullshit. After all, it's built on biology, which is built on chemistry, which is built on physics. Doctors obviously know nothing any half-decent physicist would know!
Also, computer science is not simple. Just like you say that EE is "a hell of a lot more than circuts," computer science is a hell of a lot more than programming. A detailed understanding of compsci consists of a good understanding of the underlying EE principles, and an excellent understanding of algorithm analysis (which is not just understanding big-O notation, a misconception I have found many EEs have). Computer science is neither simple nor easy. It is an abstraction, but is a useful one.
I completely agree. I was looking through a box of free used books at a book store by my house. Its all the old stuff they can't sell basically. But there was a book from the mid fifties called computational algorithms or something like that and they were talking about bubble, merge, and quicksort (as well as some other stuff still used in CS depts.) as far back as then... When was the first edition of Knuth's published anyway?
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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No PA-Risc eh? Heh. Newbie. In time my son the way shall find you, but until then, you must focus on finding yourself.
CS is mad easy and you know it. Come on, Physics is a lot harder than CS. Have you ever compared the Physics GRE with the CS GRE? The CS GRE is a joke.
In 1980 as class project, my lab partner and I took 20 chips and built a 4 bit computer in about 3 hours. The instruction set was based on the 4 bit ALU.
Dude, were you at UC Santa Cruz? That was CIS 120!!!!
-- Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
No, it's just that in the modern world, it's easier to compile it and download the digital logic into an FPGA than to spend painstaking hours wiring it out of a bunch of 74xx logic gates, adders, and all that crap. That's the great part about FPGAs - no fab facility needed, no soldering required (well, you still need to connect it up to do I/O with the rest of the world).
Not all of the systems you listed are even capable of being on a network, unless of course one accepts an RS-232 connection between two systems as a "network."
You certainly could not get them to ALL talk on the SAME heterogenous network if for no other reason than that many of them lack a TCP/IP stack, or has one been developed for the TI99 and the 6502 based Apples?
Also how much rent are you paying for the missle silo you store them in anyway?
-- Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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"I have 40 or so OS's on my network at home."... and no girlfriend....
I've got a copy of OSF/1 somewhere, I think. (hope it's not gone.) If you're interested, you can have it, as I no longer have an Alpha.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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There's TCP/IP for all the Apples. Home brew, but workable.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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CS is a joke. EEs now can do anything current CSs can do. All the real advances in computational sciences are put forth by mathematicians. A CS major is just someone who was too stupid to become a real engineer, and too lazy to go through a math program.
An EE will at least have an understanding of anything from chemistry all the way through everything a CS student has to learn. A CS student will gain knowledge about applying high school algebra to machines an EE built and will end up competing with high school dropouts for Java programming jobs.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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routing? LOL. you don't DO routing. computers route for you nowadays man. it's the 21st century, not the stone ages of routing by resist ink pens.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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I'm not trying to pick a fight, but what concept (beyond the work of Von Nauman machine, Turing, and Shannon) has actually survived 5 years in practice? (A lot, I know, but less than you would think.)
I remember a time before Object Oriented programming. I remember when 640K was REALLY enough for everyone. Look back in your own lifetime, see the complete upheavals in the field of computer science, and tell me that we have 25 years of ANYTHING with a straight face.
Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks mpressive--don't touch it! But I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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Could you imagine a beowulf cluster of pdp11's in the former Soviet Russia?
No way dude! In the former Soviet Russia a beowulf cluster of pdp11's would imagine you!!!
Ah the good ol' days of college when you didn't have to worry about looking for/losing a job. I remember learning Simulink VHDL and coding a complete computer from scratch and programming it on a FPGA...I think that particular project ate a good couple thousand hours but it was very satisfying when it worked...Writing the 350+ pages of documentation for it...well sucked. It didn't have a vga card, but it had good ol' 12x24 pixels of screen output! and a whopping 2k of RAM.
-- We've secretely replaced the Enterprise's dilithium crystals with Folgers crystals. Lets see if they notice.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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As an A+ Certified tech, I take offense to your comment....and yes I don't want people to know that
When I was a at uni, I wrote en epic novel, directed and produced some films and mapped the city. It was just a matter of finding the money to make them real.
Designing a CPU is not difficult. What IS difficult, is to design something sophisticated like a Pentium-4. But a simple CPU can be done in 1-2 days. Basically, when you already know a hardware language like VHDL or Verilog, and know how a CPU works in general, it's just as simple as designing a software virtual machine (like JAVA) or an interpreted tokenized language (like some BASIC dialects).
The main problem with self-designed CPUs is that you don't have any support tool chain. You have to write your own assembler (and possibly disassembler), or adapt one of those meta-assemblers (eg XCASM). And you have to write your own C compiler, or port one of the free ones (LCC or GCC), if you want to do larger projects with your CPU.
In most cases it is not worth the hassle to design your own CPU, because recently the FPGA vendors started to give out CPUs for free (eg NIOS, or MicroBlaze/PicoBlaze) with free toolchain support (usually GCC).
When you start a CPU design TODAY, it's usually for one of these reasons:
- educational (many textbooks design a CPU while teaching logic)
- prototype a new revolutionary approach (like eg PACT's XPP)
- you need a little bit more than a statemachine, but the smallest "real"
CPU is already too big for you (in this case, the toolchain problem is
non-existant - you can code the "firmware" manually)
uIP was easy enough to get running on the 6502. The tough part is slip/ppp. The appleIIe is only doing localtalk, which still counts. Hell, it's even switched localtalk... Synoptics Lattistalk.
The appleIIe's corvus omninet card is unused, only have a second card for my TRS-80 Model II, and no concentrator (if it even used one). Would love to get my hands on the ISA omninet card, though it hasn't shown up on ebay.
The SGI Indy is on ethernet and 155mps ATM (only other machine on ATM besides my server). Trying to get its rs422 to do localtalk also... may not be possible.
The two sparcstations are on ethernet and token ring, and ethernet and HIPPI.
you know, cutting out pictures of chips and gluing them onto a piece of paper really isnt the same thing.
Maybe not in your little corner of the universe, but here in Paperville, the kids at the local collage use this technique for all their class projects.
We think that a strong background in the paste-and-paper culture gives our youth a healthy respect for those ideals that make our society strong. Our crime rate is the lowest in the nation and we haven't had a running-with-scissors incident in years, thankyewverymuch.
-- You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine "Math in a song is good."-Linford
Back in the 1960s an eighth grade science teacher led a class project whereby they built a 4-bit CPU using 24-volt relays for logic, light bulbs for output and contact switches for input. He wrote a small book about it with complete plans, which I borrowed from the local library in the 1970s.
A Google search turned up a 1936 Bell Relay Computer and 3 gazillion "frame relay" or "relay board" hits, but not this book. Sigh.
-- You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine "Math in a song is good."-Linford
Heh, you'd be surprised with what you'd get if you let a routing progran route 50 ICs on a two-layer board:). There's still a lot of human intervention needed to get good results.
-- Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Yes that is true, we did the same thing.. great theory... but not much more:( Though now adays you could at least test it 'virtually'.
Back then even testing wasn't an option considering a Z80 was amazing stuff when I was in school.. And AMD bitslice.. wow!
I would imagine many structural engineering schools are the same way.. Design huge buildings on paper in class, but it takes millions to put the design to test..
Actually a lot of engineering fields have the same problem of cost im sure..
You're pretty much right. Designing a basic CPU really isn't as big a deal as anyone who hasn't done it thinks it is. I did a basic microcoded CPU based on a PDP-like instruction set as my senior design project, and I pretty much designed it from scratch. Implemented it in an FPGA.
I was TA'ing a course this sememster where we help sophomores build a basic MIPS like computer in a Spice-derived language. Several years ago, they actually built the computers out of discreet TTL components.
Bussing your CPU with a self-designed video controller, and writing operating system software and such for it does go beyond the basic undergrad computer engineering experience, however:)
-- The following sentence is true.
The preceding sentence was false.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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looks like a very big network:P or was this last year?
Most circuit engineers out in the real world, even the low-level CMOS types, just draw pictures. The process of turning those pictures into the actual thing is either done completely automatically, or by lower level lab techs.
Sorta like the pyramids. Those who designed them didn't go dragging stone slabs around! (Not saying that IC lab techs are slaves or unskilled or... uh oh. I hope I don't get flamed by any:O )
-- The following sentence is true.
The preceding sentence was false.
uIP was easy enough to get running on the 6502. The tough part is slip/ppp. The appleIIe is only doing localtalk, which still counts. Hell, it's even switched localtalk... Synoptics Lattistalk.
If you have a MacIP implementation for the IIe, all you'd need is a LocalTalk-Ethernet bridge for it to start talking to the Internet. That's how my IIGS is set up...Marinetti (free) provides MacIP support, and a Cayman GatorBox CS (~$20 from an eBay seller) acts as both bridge and MacIP gateway. (The ironic bit is that my Apple IIGS uses MacIP, but my Macs don't...the Quadra 610 and beige Power Mac G3 desktop have built-in Ethernet, so they "speak" IP natively.)
Aside from the short LocalTalk run between the IIGS and the GatorBox, everything here that's networkable uses Ethernet. Even the IBM PC/XT is on Ethernet...it has a 10BaseT NIC installed (8-bit ISA, of course) so that it can plug directly into any hub or switch. It runs DR DOS 6.0 and one of the DOS-based network clients off of the NT Server 4 CD. It's able to access network shares on any of the Win32 or Linux boxen here...still don't have FTP or Telnet clients, and I'm guessing that SSH is out of the question for a 4.77-MHz 8088.:-)
The only machines I have that aren't on the network at this time are an Apple IIe, Apple II+, TI-99/4A, TRS-80 CoCo 2, and VIC-20. The IIe has a LocalTalk card in it (the Apple II Workstation Card, which is what I'm guessing you have in yours), but while it can access files stored on a Mac, I've not gotten it to cooperate with netatalk. IP support would be cool...since my IIe runs my brewing fridge, it could be monitored across the network that way.:-)
After 2 years of searching, I found the MacIP server software... it only compiles under BSD. Never have been able to make it work. Even so, I've only had mized success with the isa localtalk card.
Now, you might appreciate this, so I'll mention it. One of my projects, is to create a localtalk network so strange, it will curdle milk and make babies cry. So far, here is what I believe could be hooked into it.
x86 PC (already done, isa ltalk card) Macs (duh, already done) Amiga (zorro2 doubletalk card, trying to find it) SGI (Indy's serial ports are compatible at the hw level) NeXTstation (serial ports seem compatible, dunno if software was ever written) Apple II (both the GS and E have the hardware) Lisa (I've heard hints, but never read anything conclusive) Atari Falcon (ST series, had a mini8 "lan" port, that is compatible at the hw level) Newton (already done) RS/6000 (the old microchannel POWER based machines... could they use a microchannel ltalk card?)
Of course, I still need to build a complete HIPPI, starlan and econet segment, before I can claim masterpiece status.
I really need to get off my ass, and work on a PCI ltalk card. plx9052, a zilog scc... which brings us all back to the VHDL that I suck at.
Mostly to keep things simple for a assembly language book for kids. It's 4bit, has 16 instructions, and can address 256 nybbles of ram.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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You mean besides his mother?
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Anonymous Coward
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So why do companies send test chips through the fabs? Physical design vs. RTL-level VHDL/Verilog vs. behavioral VHDL/Verilog are all different beasts. You talk as if all chips are 'compiled to silicon' in a manner analagous to invoking gcc.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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Shh... don't tell him there's an option to have/. mail you when someone responds to your post.
The EPROM probably serves the purpose of microcode. Basically, a single opcode acts as a sort of 'subroutine branch' into the microcode, and the microcode sequences the register file, ALU(s), and so on. Those latter bits, the register file, ALUs and so on, all are likely implemented in FPGA or discrete logic.
Yet sopmehow its more fun to do it the old way, I never actually built my own cpu but back in the mid 80s in Russia even the most primitive consumer computers werent avalible, variuos hobbist schematics were published in electronics magazines and I had to hunt down russian copies of 8but cpus and other chips on the black market then solder them
onto homemade boards (makinf the boards from special pastic required lots of hard to find chemicals and took along time too)
-- US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
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Anonymous Coward
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I run OpenBSD.
Enough said.
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Anonymous Coward
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Sir or Madam: This is Slashdot. Please understand this.
I just came home to shower to wash off the smell of pussy juices, and I thought I'd check out what's happening on Slashdot. Gonna go out in an hour and then get laid later in the night probably, if not by the same chick (who I met last night at this party), then some other chick. There are a lot of hot slutty women where I live. Earlier today I sat out in the sun and smoked a joint.
life is good.
Re:big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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... be that as it may, unless you have MVS on a 3090, you and all your computers are completely gay.
I see you mentioned your VIC-20 not being networked. See if this will help any. I guess you only have to figure out how to run uIP on it:-] which would be possible with an appropriate RAM expansion, which would be an interesting project by itself... hmmm... no really, this idea came to my just while I was typing this.
"--
Middle-eastern proverb: A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, but a melon for ecstasy. "
Dude, that's a fuckin' SICK sig. Unless you're just using it to point out how fucked up people from the Middle East are, then, it's cool.
haha No, I Have no ego. I'm a loser, I don't even have a "p4 3,1ghz overclocked with 1gb of ram" I have an athalon 1.53ghz with 256mb of ram. I wanted to sound cool but I suppose I failed miserably. My graphics card basically sucks too (2x agp) ha. and I don't play games.
C64
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Anonymous Coward
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From the article: "The MyCPU system can be operated also in the C64-Mode, with a screen resolution of 80x25"
Sweet. Let's see if he can get Elevator Action running on that thing...
I seem to recall GEOS used this mode, too.
I thought the 80x25 mode was actually a double-res
mode, though. On a TV, the individual pixels would
be pretty hard to see, but that's more a function of the NTSC standard and cheap NTSC encoding circuitry than anything else.
Does anyone remember if the hi-res mode on the C64 doubled the horizontal resolution?
Hires = 320x200, multicolor = 160x200, so sort of. But you're still stuck with four pixel characters for an 80 column display. The C128 had a 640x200 monochrome mode that allowed for a much more readable 80 columns, but it required a CGA-compatible monitor, or better yet, a dual-mode CGA/NTSC monitor.
In other news...
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Anonymous Coward
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...A German housefire injures a computer hacker working on a weird project. Noone else was hurt.
Re:In other news...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
French man builds better dildo
Karma Whore
by
Goalie_Ca
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· Score: 0, Informative
I know i'm karma whoring but this guy's site is going to crash and burn. I copied the source from his page so if the format doesn't show up right, blame Taco.
-- welcome on my homepage --
On this side would like I mean built CCU to present, I call her " MyCPU ".
If you should see on the left of no menu, then click here .
I am conscious to me that it is a rather moved idea to build
itself its own CCU but perhaps give it of people, which I can animate
by this Website to something something similar or which even my CCU to
copy to want. I will make everything available on this side gradually,
which is needed for the reproduction of the CCU.
NEWS: The MyCPU system as the first discrete Web server: software >TCP/IP
Technical data of the CCU:
Technical structure
approx.. 50 logic ICs (74HCxx and 7ÃCxx), 7 EPROMS, 5 plates in the euro format
Current supply
simple 5V supply, power input smaller than 250 mA
Architecture
8 bits DATA, 16 bits addresses, similarly Harvard
Speed
5 MHz, dependent on the speed of the used EPROMS
Program memory
maximally 64kb addressable ROM
Data memory
maximally 64kb addressable RAM or I/O
Register
Hardware: 5 multi-function
registers, 1 constant register. Software (current Microcode
implementation): 1 accumulator, 2 index registers, 1 stack pointer
Arithmetic
High-speed aluminum, needs
only maximally three clocks per operation. Logical speed: approx.. 0,5
million multiplications per second, which is faster than 8051 based
Microcontroller count can.
Interrupt
1 maskable interrupt, RESET
Stack
256 byte stack in the conventional memory (0100h-01FFh), programmable stack pointer
Addressierungsmodi
14 addressing modes:
immediate 16bit, immediate 8-bits, immediate zeropage, direct absolute,
direct zeropage, direct absolute plus index, indirect absolute,
indirect zeropage, indirect absolute plus index, indirect zeropage plus
index, indirect plus index absolute, absolute pointers 16bit, absolute
pointers 8-bit, immediate of register
Command sentence
256 OI codes, on the average 10.5 clocks per instruction
Feature
By small modification of the hardware and another Microcode it is possible to copy other CPUs (e.g. 6502)
--
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Re:Karma Whore
by
UserGoogol
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, those links were kinda useless because if it goes down, (which it did) those links go down with it. It would've been easier to just copy the text out of your browser.
Thanks for the karma whoring, at any rate.
-- "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Re:Karma Whore
by
EvilTwinSkippy
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
What, you whored the English version. Come on folks, the german version is up there and just fine.
Oh, right, I'm one of about a dozen Americans who actually speaks another language fluently. My bad.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:Karma Whore
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
You know, there are many americans that speak another language fluently. It just may not be German. Just because it's not the one language out of many that this site happens to be in doesn't mean those people are dumb. Jeeze.
I love studying languages but I have extreme difficulties commiting words to long-term memory. My vocabulary hasn't grown since I was about 7 or 8 years old; it's a good thing that I had a huge vocabulary for a child of that age.
Can people like me still learn to speak languages fluently? Do we just need more intense experience and practice?
But, on topic, this whole sort of thing is exceptionally cool =) My friend and I designed a 24-bit microprocessor once capable of running a securely multiuser, multiprogramming operating system, but we never built it.... too complicated, too much work, not enough money, not enough time:)
-- --TheOrangeSquid
Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Wow, good thing you knew about 24-bit microprocessors and multiprogramming when you were 7 or 8 years old, or you wouldn't know what they are now, what with your Memento-like problems with vocabulary.
Or did you just tattoo all the words you wanted to remember?
> Yes, it is. They often use day/month/year instead of month/day/year
Heck, I use day/month/year in America despite popular opinion just because I think Middle/Small/Large is an effing stupid way to arrange things. Fortunately, today no one knows the difference:P thblplblpth
Re:All the news that's
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Even so, if we ever need a name for a new month, I nominate "Hexidecember". It has a nice ring to it, and my trademark registration has already been filed.
Re:All the news that's
by
rmohr02
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· Score: 0, Troll
I use year/month/day. It makes sense logically, and is understood by Americans.
Re:All the news that's
by
Captain+Nitpick
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I use year/month/day. It makes sense logically, and is understood by Americans.
It's also the ISO standard ordering, and is useful in filenames since sorting by name also sorts by date.
-- But then again, I could be wrong.
Re:All the news that's
by
Nefrayu
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· Score: 5, Funny
Even so, if we ever need a name for a new month, I nominate "Hexidecember". It has a nice ring to it, and my trademark registration has already been filed.
Unfortunately, a paralegal at SCO has just discovered that they own the copyrights to "Hexidecember.";-)
-- Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Re:All the news that's
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
*shrug*. It's just another stupid Americanism. The correct format is dd/mm/yy.
Re:All the news that's
by
RevAaron
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· Score: 4, Informative
Umm, also note that it was day.month.year- *periods* not slashes. According to worldwide standards, a period as a delineator denotes that it is in that format. Some folks will write the European format with slashes as well.
I am not sure why we americans use our silly middle-endian format. Seems to me little-to-big or big-to-little (like the Japanese with 2003-10-24) makes more sense than middle-little-big.
Isn't it great when some schmuck thinks he's coming up with a great joke? Ooooh, Aexia managed to make a dis on Slashdot's editing. Slashdot's mistakes are so few and far between that we can all just ignore that this one was just plain incorrect.:)
--
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
neither does Japan, and possibly other Asian countries, although I do not know which ones in particular. Japan has traditionally used CCYY-MM-DD.
--
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Re:All the news that's
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I use DDmmmYY for humans and YYYYMMDD for machines. I don't understand how you can sort files with the day at the beginning. then again you could just use the last modified date as a sort target.
Re:All the news that's
by
aminorex
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· Score: 2, Funny
As anyone who reads the J2SDK javadoc should know, the name of the thirteenth month is undecimber. Hexadecember would be the 18th month, therefore.
-- -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Re:All the news that's
by
NightRain
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· Score: 3, Informative
Some folks will write the European format with slashes as well.
That would be because some countries use the Day month year format and slashes. Like Australia for example. 07/06/2003
Re:All the news that's
by
PurpleRabbit
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Actually, Hexidecember belongs to Novell.
Maybe.
--
I'm on a whisky diet. I've lost three days already.
All hail big-to-little. Especially without a delimiter; 20030607 is easily readable, and always sorts properly when computerized.
Re:All the news that's
by
conradp
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· Score: 4, Interesting
neither does Japan, and possibly other Asian countries, although I do not know which ones in particular. Japan has traditionally used CCYY-MM-DD. Actually Japan has "traditionally" used, and still often uses, "[Emperor name] [year of emperor's reign]" as their common date format. You can't describe future dates without guessing how long the emperor will live, and you have to know how many years each emperor lived in order to count back very far. To further complicate things, the year that an emperor dies has two descriptions, e.g. Showa 64 is the same as Heisei 1.
They've probably started adopting the YYYY-MM-DD because that's the ISO 8601 international standard date format. I'd encourage everyone to get into the habit of using it. It sorts nicely, it's language independent, and there is less opportunity for ambiguity. When you see "03/04/02" you have to wonder whether it's American or European, but "2003-04-02" can only mean 2 April 2003. Ok, I suppose some total idiot could think it was 4 February 2003, but that would be as wholly illogical as the common American date format of MM/DD/YY.
-- "To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." -- Olin Miller
Re:All the news that's
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, the billion thing has largely been resolved in Britain and Ireland to mean 1000 000 000, despite the original definition. There's just too many americans that are "billionaires", and we can't have people thinking they're 1000x richer than they are, so "billion" in modern *british* usage is aligned with the American.
There's also a definite tendency in the EU to separate groups of three digits with spaces, because it's just to dangerous (for accountancy ideas of danger...) to mix up , and . - so these days *either* , or . is a decimal point and " " is the thousands separator.
Re:All the news that's
by
jetmarc
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> I nominate "Hexidecember". It has a nice ring to it, and my trademark registration has already been filed.
Following the tradition of submarine patents, you should keep your trademark stuck in the middle of the registration process until the new name has been widely adopted by industry and literature. Then you complete the pending registration and claim licensing fees from just about everybody on earth! Grrrrrr-reat!
Seems to me little-to-big or big-to-little (like the Japanese with 2003-10-24) makes more sense than middle-little-big.
Absolutely, but I've used that system so long that I can't use anything else without screwing it up often... I can imagine the problems there would be if the entire US switched over.
For computers, the best system would be BIG to LITTLE, because it is incredibly easy to sort. Most people, if they want a range of things, they want multiple results in a certain year, and possibly within a specific month as well. With little first, it would be easier to process if someone wanted evenything that happend on a certain date of every month, which would be a rare use.
For my own use, I have a script named "now". It outputs the data in the best format I could come up with. Today is "2003Jun07". There is NO question as to what the date is. Using 2-digit numbers for both date and month causes confusion, especially because everyone currently uses their own arrangement. It's even worse currently, because a 2-digit year below 13 could be mistaken for either date or month.
The 'now' script is very useful, as I just insert it's output into any filename with no problem because it has no space, and sorting works almost perfectly. Going through backups is so much easier when you name them "`now`-`hostname`-`pwd`.dump"...
I am not sure why we americans use our silly middle-endian format.
Perhaps for continuity, you could write decimal numbers in the same way
So 243 would be three hundred and twenty four...
ISO standard is quite usual nowadays... It can get quite strange sometimes listening to americans talking about 9/11 and wondering what's special about the 9th of November.
Re:All the news that's
by
Mwongozi
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That would be because some countries use the Day month year format and slashes. Like Australia for example. 07/06/2003
In ISO format, when omitting the year, 9-11 is clearly September 11th. Admittedly, the U.S. customarily adds the year in the wrong place, but at least we get the month-day in the right order. "11-9" for September 11th is like writing forty two "24".
I am not sure why we americans use our silly middle-endian format. Seems to me little-to-big or big-to-little (like the Japanese with 2003-10-24) makes more sense than middle-little-big.
I think this is because we say things like,
June 7, 2003 -> 6-7-2003
I know other English speaking countries don't necessarily do it the same way, but I think it's probably because of adherence to the other more widespread standards.
I know in German, you say,
7. Juni 2003 -> 7-6-2003
So DMY makes perfect sense to German speakers. MDY seems really bizarre.
Re:All the news that's
by
Lars+Arvestad
·
· Score: 1
...but at least we get the month-day in the right order. "11-9" for September 11th is like writing forty two "24".
Thing is, we in Sweden both say and write what corresponds to "11th September", so we think it is kinda backwards. And I suspect there are other languages doing the same. I can for the life of me not remember how the Germans do it. Remember, most of Europe does not *gasp* have English as their first language!
Re:All the news that's
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
That would actually be Quadradecember.
Two reasons:
1) December means "tenth month." It was pushed back to actually being the 12th month by July and August I think, named after Julius and Augustus Caesar. So for the 16th actual month, you'd need to call it "14th month."
2) Hexi is greek, not latin, as the other months are named. So it's Quadradecember and not Tetrakaidecember.
Is 9-11 actually valid in the ISO format? One of the main reasons for choosing the yyyy-mm-dd format was that it couldn't be mistaken for anything else, whereas 9-11 could easily be mistaken for a 2-hour (or 14-hour) period of time starting at 9 o'clock.
So far as I can tell, the standard doesn't allow any method to specify dates which repeat yearly, although you can use it for specifying lower precision (such as a month: 2003-04)
There are 20 types of people in the world -- those who understand the american date system, and those who don't
I've never heard of it as the "Japanese" system (then again, I never looked
for it), but the YY.MM.DD thing makes perfect sense to me, especially when
I'm naming computer files.
Consider daily backups, with the name $DATE_name.tar.bz2. With the American
system, it will sort by month first, then day, then year. So, when I'm
looking for backups, June 7th, 2003 will be right next to June 7th, 2002.
With the European system, the backups will be listed by day first, then
month, then year. So June 7th, 2003 will be next to May 7th, 2003.
The "Japanese" system works perfectly. An alphanumeric listing will group
years together, then months together, then days.
wholly illogical as the common American date format of MM/DD/YY.
It's not illogical at all. Like most rules in the United States, form follows spoken function. The usage: June 7th, 2003 is far more common than 7th of June, 2003 and thus is written 6/7/2003.
>Thing is, we in Sweden both say and write what >corresponds to "11th September"
In addition to it being common usage in the USA to put the month first then the day, it is also important to realize that "911" is somewhat universal for "Emergency". So it conveniently made 9-11 into something of an icon. It is quite characteristic for Americans to adopt an icon to represent things that they would rather not deal with.
-- -fb
Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
This is how I write a date down too. I'm a military brat with 4 years of NROTC education too, so like you, I believe this is a product of US military influence in my life.
When using the date in filenames, or a similar use where a no nonsense sorting method is needed, I fall back to using ISO myself. Roughly, yyyymmddhhmmss. Very practical.
-- Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
Re:All the news that's
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Eh? To claim that that an illogical thing must be logical just because it follows from another thing that is itself also illogical, that's just plain...er...illogical...(damn, my head hurts now)
Re:All the news that's
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That's the stupidest example of arm-chair psychoanalysis I've ever seen. And I read USENET from 1987-1998.
Actually, I see MMDDYY as going little-to-big, since that's what the actual numbers going into the date will be ordered in. Months only have a range of 1-12. Days have a larger range of 1-31. Years have a very large range.
That sounds like a fun project, but I'm wondering how much it cost to do. I found this (from his "about me" page) somewhat interesting: Since June 2002 I work now at a large electronics company in Bremen, and to mine dream job there found.
Well if you're an original Scrounger Of Unique And Wonderful Electronic Junk And Other Goodies, not as much as you'd think.;-)
I want to see his variant on the Cyrix XXXVIII donw with transisitors.;-)
We'll borrow someones nuclear reactor to power it.:-/
O...Oh, dizzy and nauseous, I saw a potential future where we didn't get on the Moore's Law bandwagon and nuclear powered computers is true and "Big Mitch" Standish is president and we're currently at war with France, Russia, and an island in the Carribean....ewwwwww
-- I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long.
--brownkitty
This project couldn't possibly cost that much, most of the IC's used you could probably find for free. The only real cost would be having your circuit boards etched.
Re:Huh
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
naaa you can't be at war with countrys you know the name of or even can spell them
this would be against the american way
Re:Huh
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
real geeks have their own etching chemicals and can pick up copper clad board at the local electronics hut for mere dollars. (or possibly less)
Well, at least he is honest with himself
by
ATAMAH
·
· Score: 1
> I am conscious to me that it is a rather moved idea to build itself its own CCU
With the hardware prices being so low at present - it IS a "moved" idea to build your own "CCU".
Re:Well, at least he is honest with himself
by
EvilTwinSkippy
·
· Score: 1
I am from Crete, and all Cretians are liars.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:Well, at least he is honest with himself
by
kirinyaga
·
· Score: 1
If you wanted a paradox you should have written :
I am from Crete all Cretians are liars and all liars are Cretians.
-- Kirinyaga
Re:Well, at least he is honest with himself
by
EvilTwinSkippy
·
· Score: 1
Actually that was never part of the puzzle. Greeks had their share of liars at the time, and Plato was too much of a perfectionist to get stuck with one hand clapping.
Besides that would make life entirely too simple if all liars were confined to a specific area.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Babelfish has a way to go yet ...
by
pantropik
·
· Score: 5, Funny
From the article:
I am conscious to me that it is a rather moved idea to build itself its own CCU but perhaps give it of people, which I can animate by this Website to something something similar or which even my CCU to copy to want. I will make everything available on this side gradually, which is needed for the reproduction of the CCU.
Say that 3 times fast. Go ahead, I dare ya.
The site is short on (understandable) details, but the thing apparently runs at a blistering 5Mhz which happens to be 5Mhz faster than anything I could ever build. Impressive, but I don't think AMD and Intel should be worried just yet. Via... maybe.
Re:Babelfish has a way to go yet ...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
that is one of the funniest things i've read on here in a long time. funny comment throughout!! good job!
Re:Babelfish has a way to go yet ...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I don't see that. The latest Babelfish translation of the page reads as follows:
Forbidden You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
Hieliche Schisse!
by
EvilTwinSkippy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This guy is hard core. Look at his parts list: NAND gates, NOR gates. I don't care if this thing doesn't do more than run a train set, just the work that went into it was impressive.
I remember playing with this stuff in VLSI. It's quite another thing to actually lay it out on hardware and wire the sucker up. He designed his own ALU, register paths, everything. God, and I can barly find time to play with my Mindstorms kit.
Macht Spass Jung!
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:Hieliche Schisse!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
back in the day i only had a 48k speccy. you SHOULD feel grateful
Re:Hieliche Schisse!
by
EvilTwinSkippy
·
· Score: 2, Funny
If I see far, it is because I stand on the backs of giants.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:Hieliche Schisse!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
"If I see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" wrote Newton to Hooke. Having said that, awesome website man. G'luck with the kid.
Its not _that_ difficult. I just had to do this a few weeks ago for my computer organization class. We build a processor that was a stack machine sort of in the spirit of the HP3000. Had to design everything at the gate level; registers, alu's, etc. It was definitely intense work, but it nevertheless quite doable.
Re:Hieliche Schisse!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
In Comp Sci we stand on each other's feet....
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
If I see far, it is because I stand on the backs of giants. I've certainly heard that saying before, but, strictly speaking, wouldn't it be more benefitial to stand on the _heads_ of giants?
If I see far, it is because I stand on the backs of giants.
I've certainly heard that saying before, but, strictly speaking, wouldn't it be more benefitial to stand on the _heads_ of giants?
Only if you can find a giant with a flat head. If you can't, you're likely to fall off and injure yourself.
Here in Slashdot I sometimes feel I can see further because I'm surrounded by midgets.
-- Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
But does it run Linux!?!?
by
qwerty823
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Sorry, someone was gonna ask, so it might as well be me.:-)
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
EvilTwinSkippy
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· Score: 1
No (whack.) Just shut up and look at the pretty lights...
I don't think it has nearly enough RAM, 256 opcodes, and 5 registers.
Now, Minix on the other hand might be right up this guy's alley.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
EvilTwinSkippy
·
· Score: 1
Sorry to Reply the reply...
I'm picking through the original German. He actually has an emulator for the system. Technically you could run it under linux, and then modify it to the point that it would run Linux itself, and then run linux under it (at least in simulation.)
By that point some guy in a black trenchcoat will be sitting in a room with a red and a blue pill for you to take...
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
Jucius+Maximus
·
· Score: 1
I don't have the heart to imagine a beowulf cluster of these things...
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
rtaylor
·
· Score: 2, Funny
No, but there is a port for NetBSD being worked on;)
Back in my day I had to write games in BASIC, on a 4.7Mhz computer with no hard disk and 128K of RAM. And I was grateful
Mine ran at about 1 Mhz, with 2k of RAM, and the maximum graphic resolution was something like 160x90 pixels in your choice of black or white.
I love this industry. Here I am, not yet 40, and I can swap stories with the old-timers. Unfortunately, I didn't have the opportunity to build an Altair, where you programmed it in binary by flipping switches and pressing a latch button. My 25-cents-per-week allowance just didn't stretch far enough.
-- The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
liquidsin
·
· Score: 1
It obviously does, as he seems to be serving his website from it.
-- do not read this line twice.
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
How about a Beowulf Clust... Oh, never mind.
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
you mean uClinux.
Re:But does it run Linux!?!?
by
j2demelo
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· Score: 1
Gotta love slashdot! An article mentions hardware, even just in passing, and some ass has to ask if it runs linux.
qwery823... it starts with the first piece of litter. Insted of assuming someone else will litter anyway, keep the junk in your pocket and hope the next schmuck does the same.
Technology moves ahead.
by
stph
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Holy 1970 Batman! The fiend has built his own computer! What nefarious plans he must have?
Brad Templeton would be rolling in his grave
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
if he were dead.
Re:Brad Templeton would be rolling in his grave
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Brad would like this- did you ever meet Brad?
Re:Brad Templeton would be rolling in his grave
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, but I used his PAL assembler as well as Alice Pascal all those years ago. The guy's a genius.
Re:Brad Templeton would be rolling in his grave
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If it weren't filled with some veteran.
The real translation:
by
Obiwan+Kenobi
·
· Score: 2, Troll
This guy has too much time on his hands.
Re:The real translation:
by
red5
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Better to waste it on that than lame one line pot-shot slashdot posts ( Yes, I realize the irony of this post ).
-- I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Re:The real translation:
by
dirvish
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Re:The real translation:
by
Vej
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
guess you've never been a programmer or engineer. you don't learn on the job:)
Re:The real translation:
by
msheppard
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Nobody has too much time on their hands. I used to think I knew what that comment meant, but now I tend to classify it in the same bin as the comment "Whatever." A sort of brush off or dismisal from a person who does not understand what is being presented.
I know I'm kind of babeling here, but telling a person who hacks up something like this that "They have too much time on their hands" is a very destructive comment. If I had heard that more when I was younger I would probably be flipping burgers now instead of programming computers. A *LOT* of what computer programmers do early on can be classifed into "too much time on your hands" and if they get that comment too much they might start to resemble it and do something the ignorant person who said it thinks they should do, which usually falls into one of two channels, sports or fashion.
Are you aware of the weekly Nielsen ratings for "Friends"? Or the average number of hours logged by the top 25% of Everquest players? And WHY are you reading./ on a friday night?
Re:The real translation:
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I love it when there's +5 Trolls...
Re:The real translation:
by
MattCohn.com
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· Score: 1
You're entirely correct. Why try to design and build your own computer when you can spend your time on other more common, socially-acceptable pursuits such as sitting on your fat ass watching CNN, FOX and "American Idol", or sedating yourself into oblivion with alcohol or Vicodin. When will these nerds get with the program?
There are two kinds of people in the world -- consumers and creators. Only other creators have the slightest right to critisize others who devote their lives to creation. The rest are parasites.
-- It's been a long time.
Re:The real translation:
by
eatdave13
·
· Score: 1
There's a third kind of person that you've forgotten.
Dipshits who read a book that was written to illustrate a point and take it way too literally, who then make asses out of themselves by parroting "philosophy" every time they get the chance in the hopes that others will look up to them in the same way that they looked up to the hero of the book for having such a strong character that they weren't bothered by being persecuted, but don't realize that no one gives a flying fuck because they either weren't persecuted or ridiculed or just got the fuck over it like a normal human being, and are actually offended that there's assholes like said person walking around doing their best to make everyone's life miserable with their over the top and depressing morals.
You'll never be John Galt. Get over it, twit.
-- "Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Re:The real translation:
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
msheppard,
Thanks for sticking up for me. If you were around 5 years ago to slash at the critics, then perhaps I would be working tech support instead of feeding cattle, or become a entemologist performing some unique service.
What the bloody hell are you talking about? More importantly, why is it that every time someone poses a viewpoint here, someone decides it's someone who read a book and took it too seriously? I've pondered long hours hammering out my personal beliefs, and unlike some people, whose personal philosophy is composed of a gallery of one-liners from their favourite movies, mine is mine alone.
What I said, no matter how blunty I said it, is the truth. Right now we have people who have never written a line of code in their lives telling us how to write software. People who have never designed anything in their lives telling us how to design software projects, people who have never pondered greater strategies for more than an instant telling us where to take things, it's a zoo. As far as I'm concerned, only people who have created something should be able to say these things. Only they know the burden of creation. Everyone else is just an irritating consumer who thinks he knows better than everyone else because he watched a couple made for TV movies.
By small modification of the hardware and another Microcode it is possible to copy other CPUs (e.g. 6502)
Didn't steve wozniack use the 6502 back when he made the apple ][. Hell overall, i bet you steve used less chips too. With the technology we have today i'm sure steve could've designed an insane system for what it cost him back then.
That is hillarious. That was exactly what I was picturing. I sure as hell wouldn't try to build a CRT. I won't even open up the case of an existing CRT.
...I won't even open up the case of an existing CRT.
Oh, my goodness, you clueless weenie.
They're not that much different from TV's,
and I've opened up (and repaired) dozens
of TV's, with no formal education.
I bet you never opened up a radio, or a
clock, or changed the oil in your car, either.
-- The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
I just know that there is a charged coil in there that can zap you, even if it is unplugged. And there are toxic chemicals in there. I like to open stuff up (even radios clocks and cars), but not if it can electrocute when it isn't even plugged in.
If you compare (early) midevel English and Germany texts side by side it is clearly visible that Germany and English are nothing but two dialects of the same language. Maybe it was comparable to today somebody coming from Texas speaking to somebody coming from NY or someone from Hamburg talking to someonefrom Munich.
Um no. There is no charged coil when its unplugged. Coils can only be charged when they have current flowing through them.
What will nail you is the charge on the tube which can last days. Its a effectivly a large leyden jar (read that as capacitor).
Once the grounding grid on a color crt is removed, the outside of a tube can build up quite a charge.
The coil used for the HV is good for many tens of thousnads of volts when its on. Typically the better quality on the tube, the higher the voltage. It must have a source of power to generate the high voltage.
As far as I remember, it's generally accepted that the Saxons (from what is now northern Germany) invaded what is now England around the mid 5th century AD. At that point, the same Germanic language was being spoken certainly in those two places, as those two groups of people were really the same group. Eventually, the Celtic speaking natives of adopted the Germanic tongue. Then there was that whole Norman invasion thing in 1066. To cap things off, during the Enlightenment English and German took different approaches to adding new words to their languages, with English borrowing Latin words more verbatim, while Germans translated the individual parts of the words into German parts and then reassembled them. It's amazing what 1550 years filled with invasions and cross-cultural influence can do.
Even today, someone speaking a Hamburg dialect will not really be able to understand someone speaking a Munich dialect. Even people who speak the leveled standardized German well won't necessarily understand those dialects either.
Re:Ahhh,
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, no, no. That was on Star Trek. The guys were reading from their ancient manuscripts, and it was all just gibberish to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Then at the end, they see the paper, and it is a copy of the Constitution. You are just stealing Gene Roddenberry's ideas, man.
Right after the ENIAC and UNIVAC port. Then soon after NetBSD shall be ported to the EMU10K1. Not to operate the sound card -- an actual port to the EMU10K1.
And you know something, it's DEFINATELY ready for the desktop!
You start using it, and the next thing you know, it's two days later, you have a handcuff on one wrist, your keyboard has been replaced with a single button, and somewhere in there, you made your computer do everything you'd ever want it to do, with the touch of a button...
Back in my day I had to write games in BASIC, on a 4.7Mhz computer with no hard disk and 128K of RAM. And I was grateful.
You were lucky.
Back when I was young I had to get up two hours before I went to bed, drink a glass of sulfuric acid and had an Atari that connected to my tv and had to transcribe games from the manual and if the game was over three pages of code my "computer" would freeze
Great monty python skit!
-- 500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
This is cool--don't get me wrong. But I fail to see anything here except that this guy will likely land dozens of job offers.
-- The Political Programmer
Re:And the point?
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Skim123
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, it lacks a point. Kind of like playing computer games, reading, watching TV, or any other hobby. Oh wait, all those things are fun and enjoyable (save the watching TV part). Maybe that's why he did it?
--
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Re:Cool for the geek factor...
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dirvish
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· Score: 2
Give the guy a break!
by
PHAEDRU5
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I remember dreaming my own CPU with bit slice logic. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can find some BYTE photocopies and other notes from my first attempt in like 1980, or so.
I remember dreaming of building cards to hook to an S100 bus, including a Z-80 CPU with a ROM and redirection logic.
I mean, I can see how things change. It's kind of interesting to see a whole generation of hardware hackers think in terms of gate arrays, or their children. Who never smelt solder.
Yeah, it's pretty sad when people can't extract sap from trees to make the plastic on the breadboard for the computer they're building.
It's pretty sad when people don't make their own solder.
Or when they just plug something into a wall to get electricity. They're just CONSUMING. blech
What a disgusting society we live in...
One of my friends did this for senior project
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
in High school. Even wrote his own Bios. Board of people (teacher and people from community) gave him a C for his effort.
Re:One of my friends did this for senior project
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i_am_nitrogen
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· Score: 1
That can't possibly be a true story, unless he was from Clearfield, Utah, where grades are based on how important you are to the football team. I'm glad I'm out of high school.
Well, if you're allowed to 'optimise' your drivers for the 3DMark application, and it's non-interactive, wouldn't it be okay to just create movies of the demos, and play them back at 100fps whenever the demo is run? That way you could get killer scores on even the oldest hardware...
So what's so special?
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HungWeiLo
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is a typical double-E undergrad computer architecture design project. Or are other schools falling so far behind (I go a public school, and FAR from being the top student) that this stuff stands out as impressive?
-- There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
This is a typical double-E undergrad computer architecture design project
You have to also design an operating system and a basic interpretter for your hardware?
--
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Re:So what's so special?
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Chanc_Gorkon
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· Score: 1
In some cases yes. Although we used a 8085 chip (did not build our own). This would be more like a senior project in undergrad. One I had never seen donw was a 8086 trainer. Mostl;y it was cost on this one. Back wehn I was there, if you had a 8086 chip, it was in a IBM PC.
--
Gorkman
Re:So what's so special?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
In my program, I switched from EE to CS but hardware classes where required for both, we had to build a simple CPU wire it to a board and program a simple BIOS for it.
Later in the cirriculm we wrote a very simple OS, not for the SBC we built but to run on DEC hardware. Finally we wrote a simplified C compiler, yes I said compiler not interpretter, that ran on Linux, *BSD and IRIX. Of course we could have written all of the above for the SBC we built however since the above courses spanned a few years it probably wasn't feasible.
So many CS and EE programs require you to do very similar work.
Re:So what's so special?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Using "an" when the next word begins with a vowel will improve the readability of your posts. This is not a grammar troll, I'm just trying to make a useful suggestion.
We just did it this semester. The actual project were up to us to choose and what could be more fun and rewarding then to design and implement your own CPU. We study Computer Science and Engineering at the University of LinkÃping, Sweden.
That was quite impressive. Most students don't do such impressive projects though. I do hope that most students find the course to be educational though.
You were the ones who implemented all kinds of videogames on your CPU, right?
Nope, that wasn't us, unfortunatly. My group was clearly divided when it came to the actual implementation of the CPU which left me hanging on my own. I'm planning a comeback this fall with the next course over at ISY, KMM. This time we will choose the members of the group more carefully and leave out the project leader types and aim for more of a hacker aproach. The way it should be. I personally believe that the hacker mentality needs some encouraging from the University, this course, DK, could and I believe it should give the student a push in the back and raise the bar a bit. One can always spend time at Lysator or at Admittansen but getting credited for doing the things you want to do, most likely for the rest of your life, is always nice.
Even if your taking advantage of free university resources, your not going to be able to make anything that comes close to an athlon. That would put this into what we call, "just something to do".
Does it run Linux. Wow! It does? Imagine a beowulf cluster of those. Wait...5 MhZ. Um, nevermind.
-- "I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
For All You "Does it run Linux folks"
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jtshaw
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You can build your own CPU in and FPGA these days and run linux on it..... Though a big FPGA isn't exactly cheap.
Anyway, most of us that went through college engineering programs did something similar to this at one time. Whether it was building a computer out of parts or designing and architecture in VHDL and throwing it with some assembly code on an FPGA. It is a good way to learn how architectures really work.
Re:For All You "Does it run Linux folks"
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Maditude
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· Score: 1
Anyway, most of us that went through college engineering programs did something similar to this at one time. Whether it was building a computer out of parts or designing and architecture in VHDL and throwing it with some assembly code on an FPGA. It is a good way to learn how architectures really work.
Takes me back to my junior-year comp-sci class back in the mid-80's -- we built the StuPIDD 4 (Student Project In Digital Design) -- a very speedy (well, it ran as fast as your thumb could push the clock/plunger) 4 bit computer, on a giant breadboard and wire-wrapped stuff everywhere. It was an interesting experience, but I'm glad to make my living coding, rather than with hardware!
Re:For All You "Does it run Linux folks"
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Maddog+Batty
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· Score: 1
Though a big FPGA isn't exactly cheap.
Alteras FPGAs can fit multiple 32 bit processors into a $30 device. I've just started work with their dev kit so i'm not an expert but the basic processor design takes up about 15% of $30 device and you can get something operational in a few hours of work. The design tools they provide do most of the work for you so its no big deal.
Yep... see it now, just missed that section. It's a fixed-sync VGA-monitor-compatible signal. Pretty much the best you could expect given his desire to limit the technology used...
Re:VGA Card?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
not to be rude, but, what do you think he played his c-64 game on?
One of the screens mentioned it was running on an emulator... that's what threw me off. (I didn't see that he actually had the hardware done, but I missed the page)
Well, I don't think anyone is going to be trying to top my sig for a while. Hard to do much better than: You had a microprocessor? I had to fab my CPU out of discrete components and develop my own microcode, assembly routines, and C compiler.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
[Sounds like you had a C128... if not, what machine was that?]
You used 128 mode and BASIC? Slacker...:-)
I used 64 mode (most of my friends still had 64s, I really didn't have a use for the extra memory, and it ran faster) and wrote in machine language--not assembly... I didn't know that there was such a thing as an assembler at the time. I had an Apple II CPU manual that was reasonably close enough to the 64 to get the opcodes right, the memory map from the back of the 128 manual, and a hand-copied list of system call addresses from a borrowed C64 Reference Manual. There's nothing like hand-calculating your conditional jumps, then add a byte here, add two bytes there... DAMN! Too far for the short jump.
But then again, 64 mode didn't have the "SYS 32800,123,45,6" easter egg... Link Arms, don't Make Them. *sigh* They don't make 'herdware' like they used to.
Actually it was an IBM PCjr, but I won't let that get in the way of an otherwise entertaining post.
For the record I was later handling my own interrupts under Dos 6 in C to write my own mouse handlers, video drivers, and an artificial intelligence that was last seen wreaking havok in Latvia.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
...and an artificial intelligence that was last seen wreaking havok in Latvia.
Your information is outdated. In the hottest AI-hunt ever seen by man (or woman, or, surprisingly, by cat), it managed to escape the Latvian police and flee to Finland using a speedboat (made a stop to refuel in Estonia). Operating under the name Linus Torvalds, it is now trying to dominate the world.
-- Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
8080cpu, 16Kb memory, assembler, cassette player for storage...
When I got a Sinclair Spectrum, I didn't know what to do with myself - twice as many registers, 4MHz clock, z80 cpu, Sinclair Basic. Still only 16Kb memory and cassette player, though. I eventually got some kind of 5.25inch floppy interface for it that turned out to have some bits of a parallel port available on a 9-pin Canon D-type connector.
I think the last program I wrote for that Spectrum was in assembler to toggle the parallel port to drive a bunch of radio-control servos using The Beasty controller. Counting bytes in delay loops to get precise timing to deliver 8 servo control pulses in a 20ms frame. I never quite got around to building the Lego robot to go with it, unfortunately.
I think the last program I wrote for that Spectrum was in assembler to toggle the parallel port to drive a bunch of radio-control servos using The Beasty controller.
Heh, those were the days. I remember controlling a scalectrix set with a custom built interface board and BBC model B. I spent ages hand-tweaking the delay loops (it was one-bit digital, so the only modes were full acceleration and no acceleration) so that it would go around the track in the fastest possible time. There was no feedback, so after about three circuits the car would fly off the track, still it was quite fun watching friends lose to a computer that couldn't even see the car it was driving:)
I double checked this... you're right. What threw me was that the 128 had two modes of operation, "fast" and "normal". Normal mode was 1.022 MHz, Fast was double that (which, if you were running in normal 40-column video mode caused the video chip to lose synchronization and blank the screen until you dropped back into normal mode).
I was thinking that normal was 2+MHz and fast was 4+MHz. Been a while...
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The results are in: Most Ignorant Post Ever!
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 1
It will "suck more"? In that it can't run your beloved Windows XP? You act as if this is even comparable to an Athlon, nothing done even as a college level compsci project with a $500 FPGA could hope to outperform such. It isn't the point at all. As for "worth the trouble", you seem to imply that any learning or hobby not pursued because it's obvious that it will be rewarded in the next 10 seconds is unjustifiable.
Me, I'd love to design my own little CPU, if I could even figure out how to manage even the simplest VHDL code. $100 books that have to be ordered, and nothing on the web kind of puts the damper on that. What's your excuse? You don't care how the magic video game box works?
Re:The results are in: Most Ignorant Post Ever!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
nothing done even as a college level compsci project with a $500 FPGA could hope to outperform such.
While I agree with the sentiment, I think you need to be cautious as to what you expect someone with a $500 FPGA to be capable of pulling off. I've found that life has a way of surprising you. Sure, they may not be able to implement something faster than an Athlon clocked as fast as a Pentium 4 with the physical limitations of an FPGA (not to mention time), but saying it can't be done?
Maybe it's just the cautious streak in me, but there may be a genius who could figure out how to exploit an FPGA to build a working quantum computer that could kick any supercomputer's ass factoring large numbers.
It really depends a lot on the problem you want to solve: even a simple FPGA running at 25 MHz could probably kick the butt of an Athlon when it comes to adding 1024 8-bit numbers together, because it can do them in parallel, while the Athlon was simply never designed to do that.
This is what I find so fascinating about the idea of FPGAs making their way into general purpose computers as a co-processor or add-in card, sorta the way the whole 3D accelerator craze caught on. The idea that you'd be able to reprogram a little chip inside your computer to run a custom algorithm in a massively parallel fashion that you can only do in hardware... it's really exciting.
Re:The results are in: Most Ignorant Post Ever!
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NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 1
Point taken. It won't be me though, I can't even get this damn XC9572 to do what I want, and I'm only trying to do address decoding for a custom Z80 board.
I think that the point wasn't to make a cpu that would become something even comparable to those that you can buy from best buy or frys. It was to see, hey can I build a cpu?
freetranslation.com works better
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I am aware that it is a rather crazy idea to construct myself its characteristic CPU, but perhaps there are yes people whom I can animate through these websites to something similar or who
want even my CPUS reproductions. I will allocate everything on this side gradually, what is required to the reproduction of the CPUS.
"welcome on my website"
That's nice. Welcome on my post.
"Build Your Own Computer"
Wow! You can?! Amazing. Incredible. This guy deserves an award. Wait...I built one three years ago. Sorry, but you're about 30 years late.
P.S. Yes I know that it was translated in Babelfish.
-- "I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
I don't see why it's not worth the trouble; I'd love to figure out how to build my own CPU and actually know something useful instead of how to seat all the magic bits on a board and then smack the power button to see if it comes up, like most "hardware hackers" these days. Oh, I forgot, you cut a window and put a blinky light inside your case.
I'm working on something cooler
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Pehhh! This is nothing. I'm building my own CPU by only using transistors... (ehemm! and, resistors and capacitors off course)
So is this thing pipelined? Branch-prediction? Speculative execution? How about a cache-consistency protocol? Darn, no out-of-order execution or completion units? I expected a tuned a 4-way SMP NUMA box w/ 128MB of on-die cache and dual-ported RAM. I coulda made that w/ light-switches, solar cells and duck-tape.;)
Once in comp arch class, we were asked on a final to design a 32-bit pipelined microprocessor out of twigs and bits of string. Beat that! JK. It just seems people have too much free time nowadays, whatever happened to the 90 hr work-week and sub-standard working conditions?
Silly, a few PALs and an FPGA would be alot cheaper, and there's even specs from Altera how to make a VGA or TV composite output single. Heck you can built your own programmer, and altera gives away the dev tools for free; less parts, less hassle. All you need is 2x the amount of ram you want for a framebuffer, and you can do synchronous double-buffering to avoid having dual-ported or SGRAM/WRAM.
-- The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Re:#define SILLY 1
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You committed the fatal techie-nerd flaw! "duct tape", not "duck-tape"!
Probably not, and it is an impressive achievment, but it makes the achievements of the early computer pioneers look even more impressive. The first turing-complete machine (ie the first fully capable computer), the Z3, was pipelined. And it was made out of relays and bits of metal. And it did floating point arithmetic.
A few PALs and an FPGA would be cheaper, but it wouldn't be as much fun. The whole appeal of a project like this, I imagine, is building stuff up from the ground up. That's why Linus started a multitasker to learn about the 80386, and why I'm writing a game now that talks to Xlib directly as one of its backends. (Another potential graphical backend is VBE framebuffer, but I think the DOS port is an idea that's far past its life. Still, we'll see; I have all my old VBE setup code laying around. Hmm... I also wrote some simple protected mode code in those days, but never got to multitasking. Sigh.)
Oh, and in the industrialized world, 90 hour work weeks and sub-standard working conditions are an American phenomenon these days. The French, for example, get enough leave to blow your mind:D
ahh... pointless criticism! Dont worry SkewlDood, we wont insult you for misspelling DUCT-tape:)
just remember that solar cells are called photovoltaic cells in technical reference.... since we're 'obviously' getting technical, here.
you wouldnt happen to build sculptures out of burned-out vga cards, would you?;^)
with that kind of (stupid) reasoning...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
they should never have a translation for chinese, spanish, french, portuguese, italian, etc, etc, quit looking for an excuse to be an elitist ass. btw, i speak english, and spanish fluently, and am learning french.
Seriously, though, I like that he added the LCD status display. Most people would just use the video for display, but after having worked on boxes with those on board LCDs for status info, I've learned to love em.
In A.D. 2101 War was beginning. (...scroll...) What happen ? (...scroll...) Somebody set up us the bomb (...scroll...) We get signal (...scroll...) What ! (...scroll...) Main screen turn on (...scroll...) It's You !! (...scroll...) How are you gentlemen !! All your base are belong to us You are on the way to destruction (...scroll...) What you say !! (...scroll...) You have no chance to survive make your time HA HA HA HA.... (...scroll...) Take off every 'zig' You know what you doing Move 'zig' (...scroll...) For great justice
I know for a fact that's coded into at least one company's vending machine displays.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It's a system called "Freedom Pay." They are a dotcom that is pushing RFID to authorize payments. One of the testers showed me the text, I don't know offhand what sets it off, nor if the spiel went out to production units.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Oh, right, I'm one of about a dozen Americans who actually speaks another language fluently. My bad.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks only one language? An American, damnit.
Besides, we all know from Star Trek that when we meet the aliens, that's what they'll all be speaking anyway.
--
Carthago delenda est!
Re:Language lessons
by
EvilTwinSkippy
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· Score: 4, Funny
I'm personally waiting for the Babelfish or those nifty bacteria from Farscape.
That is of course assuming that aliens speak at all. Imagine if aliens communicated through pigment changes in the skin, or interpretive dance. I can see the aliens now performing, what looks like to us a Marcel Marceau routine, but actually is saying "Take me to your leader."
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:Language lessons
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
By the numbers, the largest dialect of english is the Indian variant (or the sum of the Indian variants if you like). By that standard, yes, we have atrocious accents.
Back in my day I had to write games in BASIC, on a 4.7Mhz computer with no hard disk and 128K of RAM. And I was grateful
Wow, you should have been grateful. My Sinclair had a whopping 1K of RAM (the factory-made Timex-Sinclair had 2K, but the kit that you built yourself had only 1K) and IIRC it ran at 1Mhz. And we had to save our programs to cassette tape -- no fancy-schmancy disk drives for us!
(first liar never wins)
-- If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Re:Language lessons
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Would you please put a separator above your sig?! It's in the options and you can also do it manually. Nothing personal, but I'm getting tired of reading it as part of your comments.
Re:Language lessons
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
Would you please put a separator above your sig?! It's in the options and you can also do it manually. Nothing personal, but I'm getting tired of reading it as part of your comments.
Try http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm, specifically the checkbox marked 'Signature Dash (Prefix everyone's signature with "--" to make it blazingly obvious where comment ends and sig begins)'
Re:Language lessons
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Imagine if aliens communicated through pigment changes in the skin,
bah! Back in MY days we only had a whopping 0.9 Mhz cpu.
C=)
Re:Language lessons
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
To this I add: You fucking dipshit.
Re:Language lessons
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
translator microbes that gathered at the brain stem... having the dvds for the series (and vcds for those not out yet) never do they say bacteria for them
If this guy ever goes camping, which is doubtful given his penchant for the computer life; I would like to go along.
I Imagine that before the s'mores are grilled (graham crackers, hershey bars & marshmallows) he will have a king sized bed made out of duck down, a T.V. made out of acorns, and an air conditioner made out of discarded spam cans.
Wonder if he is single? I have a lovely niece.
What am I saying? Of course he is single.
-- Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Re:go camping.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Of course he's single, because he'd say in bed:
"Look at this condom, made entirely out of discard chewing gum..."
But beware, while you may have your king-sized bed, and TV made of acorn, he will be compleatly unable to fix the small hole in the side of your boat, and you will be stuck on the island (named after you) for 14 years...
All I need is some soothing music, some candles, a woman, nine months, and I can build my own awesome "computer" that runs on a neural network, billions of neurons running simultaneously.
Unfortunately this is Slashdot, so I have all the time in the world, but no woman...
All I need is some soothing music, some candles, a woman, nine months, and I can build my own awesome "computer" that runs on a neural network, billions of neurons running simultaneously.
What you mean is, if you had the soothing music, etc, that you might be able to convince a woman to build the computer for you!:) Your involvement in this is pretty trivial.
Re:I can make a computer
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kurosawdust
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· Score: 5, Funny
Yeah, a computer that throws errors (and other blunt objects) constantly, coredumps at least once a day and has 33.3% downtime?
pish-posh. I'll try to find a woman who can produce me an abacus, thank you very much.
Re:I can make a computer
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Only 200 operations per second, but it's "massively parallel", right? I've heard that song and dance before. What a load of crap!
but seriously, don't you think this is a pretty big accomplishment for one person? i mean, i wasn't able to find the time it took him, but assuming it's not long, he managed to replicate technology that took 30 years in the first place! and did it all in probably less than a year. now sure, prior work is published and easily accessible but still. just the motivation of the guy to do this is unreal. who else here would do that for something that is basically useless except for "something to play with"? (though, toys are fun).
-- I write code.
Re:yeah but....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, at least you'd get some good experience if you decided to design your own CPU. That ought to be worth something.
A clear IP violation, I mean this was done in Job's garage first you know.
-- "It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
I did some of this on paper
by
earthforce_1
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Back in the 1970's when I was a teenager, and the 8080 was the newest thing on the block. But I hated the stupid instruction set. Around that time, Heathkit sold my (almost) dream computer, a PDP 11/03 clone with a paper tape reader, that would have cost me 15 years of work on my paper route. I eventually bought just the manuals, which was all that I could afford. Eventually I bought a cheaper 6800 based kit they sold, with a whopping 512 bytes of RAM, but that is another story.
I had a lot of 7400 series TTL manuals handy however, and the reading the PDP manuals gave me a lot of hints as to what I wanted in my (then) dream CPU - a 16 bit instruction set, with lots of general purpose registers, lots of fancy addressing modes, a hardware multiplier/divider, and a much larger address space so I could run a real compiler - not that interpretive BASIC crap that was all the rage back then. (I kind of knew that even if I could bring my vision to life, writing a decent compiler would be even tougher than building the CPU, but one battle at a time....) I worked out the instruction set, and designed most of the ALU, although I got stuck on trying to make the divider work. I was also somewhat disappointed in that it appeared I wouldn't be able to get the damned thing to go any faster than about 12 MHz, the TTL wouldn't work any faster. I was also stuck on what to do for memory.
I couldn't go much beyond a paper design, the parts would have cost me close to $1000, not including the UV eraser and the PROM programmers. But it was still educational. I dropped the project for good when I saw the first 68000 datasheet. Here was the CPU I had been trying to design for the past 3 or 4 years. It had an nice instruction set a lot like the PDP, plenty of registers, plenty of indexed addressing modes, and a hardware integer multiplier/divider. In 1984 I bought my first "real" computer, a 128K "thin" Mac, which sported a 6MHz 68000, and to this day, still resides in my parents closet!
(The flyback xfmr burned out years ago, a common problem with the original macs)
-- My rights don't need management.
Re:I did some of this on paper
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
(The flyback xfmr burned out years ago, a common problem with the original macs)
More likely to be the big capacitor nearby. But in either case - it's cheap to fix:
http://macfaq.org/plusanalogue.html
I fixed a few that way. Once I swapped in an amber CRT I got from digi-key or maybe jameco for $25, about 1990. That was cool.
... when I saw the first 68000 datasheet... nice instruction set... plenty of registers, plenty of indexed addressing modes, and a hardware integer multiplier/divider.
Amen, brother! I remember attending a trade conference where Motorola was unveiling the MC68020 the same day that Intel was sporting their 80386. The '020 is SOOOOoooo much nicer to code for. I mean, who needs C when Assembly is so beautiful?
-- The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Re:I did some of this on paper
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
i was always amused that my 1979 motorola 68000 had everything i needed, several years before intel even figured out what a chip could become.
plus it had a flat memory model.
and while it didn't have an mmu, with some trickery, and remapping of memory on the fly, i was able to write a virtual memory system in c (very slow, mind you), that managed to give me 10mb of virtual memory (my whole harddrive at the time!)
ah, those were the days.
Re:I did some of this on paper
by
wiresquire
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· Score: 1
...and to this day, still resides in my parents closet!
I don't know about that. Everyone around me gets a really good lesson in 4-letter vocubulary if I forget to put a static strap on and zap my new baby and/or part of the mainboard.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Where was /. when I built my General Lee model?
by
Gary+Yogurt
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· Score: 1
Sure I screwed up the Dixie flag decal and painted the interior the wrong color, but it looked pretty good. Yeah, it's been downhill from there. I don't even have a ball chair. Schwachbruestig indeed.
PS- If that word happens to infer that I like eating parrot turds then by "indeed" I meant "YAY KOOL-AID!".
:Hieliche Schisse!-Both ways in the snow.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"I remember playing with this stuff in VLSI. It's quite another thing to actually lay it out on hardware and wire the sucker up. He designed his own ALU, register paths, everything. God, and I can barly find time to play with my Mindstorms kit."
He he. Then I must have been hardcore because back in the '80s when I went for my EE. I had to build a computer from discrete parts. CPU took over a couple of breadboards, VGA,disk controller. And yes we used assembler. And the previous semester used tubes. Ah the good ol days.
At 640x480 interlaced, perhaps? you bet!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Original VGA was 640x480 256 colours, was it not? If I remember correctly: the original Amiga chip prototypes were built from discrete logic. Given the era, 74LSxx/4xxx was the limit of the parts available; yes, you could build "that fast a circuit', just not much faster. The limit of colours 32 vs 256 was a product of the speed of the DAC and DRAM, not the speed of the TTL components and there are many bandwidth tricks one can play to make even those practicable. Believe!
The author didn't implement such a circuit though or at least from what I could decipher before the/. effect took over, he didn't.
Re:At 640x480 interlaced, perhaps? you bet!
by
TheRaven64
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· Score: 1
Original VGA was 640x480 256 colours, was it not?
No, it was not. 640x480x256 is technically SVGA. VGA ran at 320x240x256 in mode 13h, which was used for most games since it was the only one which gave flat memory addressing.
Re:At 640x480 interlaced, perhaps? you bet!
by
makapuf
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· Score: 1
not 320*240, but 320x200x256 colors from a palette of 6bits*3 (262kcolors).
The flat memory adressing was interesting, but many games programmed the hardware to use anoither mode (the mode X) which used interlacing, but gave the possibility to move 4 bytes at a time and move the visible area from the video buffer (very useful to make a nice scrolling !)
ahhh those were the days...
Not too far out--really!
by
Hacker+Cracker
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Not that long ago we had to build a functioning RISC computer from logic ICs at Cal Poly Pomona. And not as a part of an EE program either--it was a part of the CS curriculum!
In all the time I spent there, that was one of the most interesting things I've ever done. Luckily for us, we didn't have to design and etch the boards, but we did have to come up with the microcode and burn it into EPROMs as well as solder a bunch of components and IC sockets onto said board. We also had to write an assembler for it as well and of course the whole thing had to work if you wanted to pass the course!
It was only capable of handling 4 bits at a time and was manually clocked (keep flipping faster! I need those spreadsheet values by tomorrow!) but by God the thing actually worked. And you could actually understand how it worked.
Even though you could conceivably expand the thing to 32 or 64 bits, I can't imagine why anyone would. Except of course if you're living in a post-apocalyptic (or post NGSCB) world where you can't walk into a store and buy one...
-- Shamus
This space for rent! EZ terms!
Re:Not too far out--really!
by
Forkenhoppen
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· Score: 1
That has got to be the coolest CS project I have ever heard of.:) What college/university did you attend?
Re:Not too far out--really!
by
kd5ujz
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why the manual clock? Why not use a 555?
-- -William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
We did something similar back in CS111 at UC Santa Cruz in the early 80s. We started with an MSI ALU, and designed a slave CPU. We hooked it up to the parallel port (8255) of a PC clone, and used a control program on the machine as the memory. Fun stuff... We only got to breadboard it, though, no soldering irons or wire wraps.
-- Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Re:Not too far out--really!
by
torpor
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· Score: 2, Funny
I want to know people like you... in case of apocalypse.
(I'll do the DOOM port...)
-- ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets.
--
I found that project to be rather boring and pointless because we didn't have to do anything but solder a few chips. Writting an assembler easy enough, and burning EPROMS is also quite easy.
I think you are the first person I know of who actually got anything out doing that project.
Re:Not too far out--really!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Even though you could conceivably expand the thing to 32 or 64 bits, I can't imagine why anyone would. Except of course if you're living in a post-apocalyptic (or post NGSCB) world where you can't walk into a store and buy one...
What if you simply didn't want a DRM-crippled CPU?
Re:Not too far out--really!
by
Hacker+Cracker
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· Score: 2, Informative
It was because there was no other interface to the thing (other than a dip switch) and the output had to be readable at each step of execution (it had two 7-segment displays and the dip switch selected which register to display). So the short answer is because of the inherent design limitations of the computer itself didn't lend itself to an automatically clocked design.
in the first sentence he mentions Cal Poly Pomona. but i would imagine this is not that uncommon. we did something similar in one of my CS classes (i attended Illinois Institute of Technology). we didn't have to do any soldering- the entire thing was drawn out in schematics and downloaded onto a FPGA. Ours used an 8 bit RISC instruction set and (IIRC) ran at a blistering 8MHz. (the FPGA had a built in 25 MHZ clock, but our design required three cycles of the internal clock for each CPU clock cycle. it also had a manual clock mode for viewing the output on the built in 7 segment led. we also received bonus points on the project for writing our own assembler. this was in a required sophomore level cs class.
later, in one of my senior electives, we designed a 32 bit cpu entirely in VHDL, which was pretty cool, but we ended up having to cut it down to actually load it onto hardware since the FPGA's we were using couldn't fit 32 (or even 16 iirc) 32 bit registers on the board properly.
both were projects i enjoyed a great deal, and those were probably two of the classes i learned to most from.
-- If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Re:Not too far out--really!
by
Forkenhoppen
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· Score: 1
I'm ashamed that I never got to experience anything like this while earning my university degree. It sounds like it'd be a real gas, and you'd learn a lot from it. The closest we had was an assembler class, which barely went into detail on how memory addressing worked, much less putting actual components into our hands, or telling us how to design something in VHDL. I feel a little gypped.:)
Jeri Ellsworth is building C1 (formerly the CommodoreOne) with no formal background in electrical engineering. It currently has a small, customized 6502 processor running inside a FPGA and it provides VGA output via a framebuffer also implemented in a FPGA.
Does she have no formal EE training? I was deeply impressed by her capabilities (I think she featured on Slashdot some time ago, that's when I saw her work).
yes, you're right. but i KNOW that there are hardcore people who think they get the "10 types of people" joke (which i hope everyone has seen before they read my 11 types of people), so they laugh even though they don't know binary. it does fall into the 10nd category.. so you're right. just my way of making fun of wanna be nerds
So what?!?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I just built my own motherboard out of two slices of whole wheat and PB&J. The CPU is made of raisins. And I've added bananas as coprocessors. Mmmmmmm delicious CPU....
D is for Deutschland, und Deutschland victory!
by
BitwizeGHC
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· Score: 1
Better not mess with the Germans when it comes to serious, hardcore geekery. This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life.
-- A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Yep, big deal
by
duck_prime
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Undergrads at most universities build their own CPUs. It's just a matter of coughing up the $$ to fabricate them.
At Berkeley in the early 90's we were still doing this. So the guy's claim is hardly unique.
That said... It is pretty hard, and is something to be proud of. This guy's accomplishment is going past a basic fetch-ALU-store implementation and actually building something useful on top. Also, his documentation is superb. This last is a jewel beyond price in professional IT.
Making your own CPU has great pedagogical value too... it really demystifies what goes on inside the machine, and gets you ready for ars technica digests!;)
All I get is a translated 404 error!
by
thdexter
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· Score: 1
Forbidden You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80
By mission ton. Kudos to babelfish.
-- I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
Re:All I get is a translated 404 error!
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thdexter
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· Score: 1
Oops, 403, rather.
-- I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
Re:All I get is a translated 404 error!
by
Daggie
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· Score: 1
you are not alone
(c) Michael Jackson
Forbidden You don't have permission to access/mycpu-g.htm on this server.
Re:All I get is a translated 404 error!
by
jester
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· Score: 1
Maybe he ought to write a web server that gives people access to his page next ?
I love the fish!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpug.htm on this servers.
403 Forbidden
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
...or should that be: 403 Verboten!
Kudos
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That is the first combo insult, german insult and ebonics comment I've ever seen. Funny too. Please continue.
hmm
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80
OK, this guy knows hardware. But has he ever heard of software, let alone upgrading it?
I can't get to this guy's website, but reading other people's replies gives me a good idea of what it's all about.
I've designed a few CPUs back when I was in college, using 74xx ALUs, etc. Never acutally implemented one, though a friend did. What I have done is buy a bunch of used relays and had my teen-age children build full adders with them. Now that's fun. You get a real sense of accomplishment when you flip some switches, listen to the relays click, and see a row of light bulbs display the sum.
Yeah, and they built an entire computer out of Tinkertoys. I think it's on display at the Smithsonian or something. Now that would be a fun project for your preteens.
If you liked that...
by
Esion+Modnar
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I feel out-geeked. The best
I can offer is programming an Altera
gate array to plug in to a 68000 processorbus and be a DRAM controller.
Languages are almost as much fun
as computers. But then I
am one of those Weird Canadians
who drove to work yesterday listening to
a Russian CD
(Tatu, 200 po vstrechnoi) and a French one (Liane Foly, Reve Orange).
I wonder if anybody (they probably have) has figured out how big a Pentium-class CPU would be if it were made from discrete transistors like you'd find at Radio Shack.
And powering it (!). That's a lot of 9 volts.
--
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
you can't walk into a store and buy one...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
...but third Saturday of the month, you can probably find one for sale in the Cal Poly parking lot!:-)
I looked at building a computer once, but it was above me, i would love to try this sh*t
-- What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock
Now search for that bug slave!
Well for my Programmable Logic Class....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
We had to build a microprocessor, and write a simple operating system. You could program the computer in assembly, so given enough time we probably could have had basic on there as well.
So, where can we get the schematics?
by
Crusty+Oldman
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· Score: 1
I'm running down to Radio Shack for some wire-wrap right now!
Re:too bad
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That's a pretty broad definition of "useful". Knowing how to seat the magic bits, and how to divine which one has lost its magic, is far more useful than being able to build one's own CPU.
Well, it depends
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
... on where you want to put your effort. No human can possibly know everything so we tend to specialize in things.
I know the basics behind building a CPU and I know how one works (I built one on paper in school many, many moons ago), but that's it. I prefer to spend time writing software and just programming stuff. Most of the time you do not need to know how a CPU works to be a programmer. Exceptions might be if you're doing embedded work, but the higher level programming requires less low-level knowledge and that's a good thing. You can focus on solving high-level problems rather than diddling around in NAND-gate-land.
He appears to have made his own webserver as well.
-- My.02,
Limekiller
How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
John+Harrison
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· Score: 1
Well, obviously x86 and Macs. Then there is the trusty TRS Model 100, and IBM makes an AIX laptop. There was also that lovely luggable version of the C=64. I always wanted one of those, but the 4" monitor seemed a bit small for games.
Oh wait, that is already five, and you asked for four. Maybe the Commodore doesn't count. Oh course, there are WinCE devices that became laptops as well...
Seriously, what are the four according to you? I am interested now.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
aminorex
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· Score: 2, Informative
You forgot the SparcBook. Does it have to have been a commercial for-profit venture to qualify?
-- -I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
malfunct
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· Score: 1
There is an Atari ST based laptop, I forget the name of it:) I wouldn't mind getting one though.
--
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
Viadd
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· Score: 1
There is also PalmOS-based Dana Alpha Smart. There are transmeta notebooks I think, but I don't know if NoMoreNicksLeft considers them a different platform. Are there any ARM notebooks? Wasn't the C-64 luggable in Osborne sewing machine format rather than notebook? The SPARC tadpole of course, as someone else mentioned.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It was called the 'STacy'. Yes, I'm a loser...
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
coryboehne
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· Score: 1
And you forgot the loveable Epson PX-4 and PX-8, both early enough that they ran the wonderfully ass backwards CP/M OS... I have one of the PX-4 unit's in great working shape (yes I bought it as a non-funtional unit 2$ at a yard sale.. I fixed it too.. Was a little difficult considering that I knew nothing of CP/M OS) I love the little peice of crap to death and I think everyone should try to find and salvage the older stuff they run across.. I think it's really sad that so much vintage hardware just ends up destroyed and dumped..
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
There's also the Alphabook from Tadpole, and I think Tadpole also made a PA-RISC laptop in the same timeframe.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
John+Harrison
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· Score: 1
Yeah, the C=64 was a luggable, so it doesn't really count. Somebody should slap together a cheapo C=64 laptop just for nostalgia's sake.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
ShadowDrake
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· Score: 1
>Are there any ARM notebooks?
I believe there was a RISCOS-based laptop... the Acorn A4 as I recall.
>Wasn't the C-64 luggable in Osborne sewing machine >format rather than notebook?
There was a 'Commodore LCD' built as a prototype... laptopy.
Also, I believe a PA-RISC laptop existed... given the size of the 712-series mainboard, I could easily see wedging something into a laptop shape.
-- It's just like a fascist dictatorship, without the punctual rail service!
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
HughsOnFirst
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yes the lovely Tadpoles,
1)The Sparcbook and ultrabooks are Solaris based on sparc hardware
2)The PrecisionBook uses the PA-7300LC processor and runs HP unix
3)Don't forget the original GRiD Compass 1100, running GRiD-OS. That was
the very first hinged laptop.
http://www.total.net/~hrothgar/museum/Compass/
Magnetic bubbles for storage yummy
Now moving on to laptops NOT made of magnesium... and available pre 1984
4) Casio FP-200 , was primarily a spreadsheet machine and ran a built-in
software package called CETL (Casio Easy Table Language), a VisiCalc-like
language The FP-200 was built around a CMOS version of the Z80 and has 32K
of ROM and 8K of RAM, expandable to 32K. The FP-200 has an 8-line X 20 character
display. For graphics, 64 X 160 pixels can be individually addressed. Had
a full sized keyboard
5) WorkSlate from Convergent Technologies, was another spreadsheet machine,
and all the software packages on the WorkSlate were adaptations of the basic
spreadsheet program. The WorkSlate used a CMOS version of the 6800 The display
on the WorkSlate had 16 lines by 42 characters. Some lines were devoted to
status indicators, headings, and formulae; as a result, about 11 by 5 cells
of a spreadsheet are visible at a time.
6) The Teleram 3000 notebook portable, weighing in at nine pounds.
Completely standard keyboard; four-line by 80-character display; 128K of
internal bubble memory (expandable to 256K); and CP/M operating system.
7) The Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, actually made by Kyoto Ceramics
, the same company that makes Yashica and Contax cameras and those cool ceramic
knives. The Model 100 uses a CMOS version of the Z80 running at 2.5 MHz.
7.5) The NEC PC-8201 twin of the Radio Shack Model 100.. The 8201
was born six months or so earlier in Japan and is a somewhat different version
of the Kyoto Ceramics original.
8) The Epson HX-20 was the first true notebook size computer introduced.
The HX-20 uses a CMOS version of the Z80 mpu. It has 32K of ROM and 16K of
RAM, expandable to 32K with an external module. Mass storage is provided
in the form of a built-in microcassette recorder and a built-in printer and
a NiCad rechargeable battery that provides 50 hours of use
9) The MicroOffice RoadRunner uses a CMOS version of the Z80 mpu and has
16K of ROM and 48K of RAM. Four memory cartridge slots are found over the
keyboard for extra RAM memory and ROM software cartridges. These are addressed
from the CP/M-compatible operating system as devices A through D Also built
in is a schedule organizer, name/address organizer Word processing, Microsoft
Basic, and Sorcim SuperCalc. More packages are promised in the future.
10) Xerox 1810 notebook portable designed by Sunrise Systems with a CMOS
version of the Z80 with 32K of ROM and 16K of RAM, expandable to 65K.
11) Gavilan It had a touch pad below the display in 1983!!! And
it had windows, a trash basket and icons before the Mac, (but after the Lisa)
!
The Gavilan had a 16-bit 8088 cpu, 48K of ROM, and 64K and RAM, expandable
with up to four 32K plug-in capsules of blank memory or applications software
packages. Also built in was a 3 inch , 320K Hitachi floppy disk drive. (
remember those? looked just like a 5.25 or 8 inch floppy ) and an optional
snap-on printer !
"The most unusual feature of the Gavilan is the touch pad below
the display. This lets you manipulate objects on the screen by pointing at
them. A quick movement of your finger moves the cursor a long way while a
slow movement gives you fine control. Like Apple's Lisa system, pictorial
representations of objects such as file drawers, file folders, documents,
and a trash basket are shown on the screen.
Although the screen is capable of displaying eight lines of 80 characters,
in most cases, part of the screen will be devoted to menus in "windows' appropriate
to the software package currently in use. Thi
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
Tychoma
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· Score: 1
There were two, the STacy & the ST Book.
The ST Book only barely made it to production though & in very limited quantities.
-- Karma: Shitty (mostly due to American moderators)
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
squiggleslash
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· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think anyone's mentioned Clive Sinclair's Z88 which was immensely popular in the very late eighties when it came out. A Z80A based device with an 80x8 screen (IIRC), BBC Basic, and an "office" type suite which was based on the idea of a sort of super-functional spreadsheet that could also word process. It was about the size of an A4 sheet of paper (except obviously not as thin)
-- You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
illaqueate
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· Score: 1
dude i have one. i wouldnt exactly call it portable tho. it weighs ~15 pounds and the last time i used it the battery lasted maybe 30 minutes. next time i'm bored ill get a sledge hammer and beat that thing until it's uncrecognizable
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 1
Or, you could sell it on ebay for $500. Save the mindless destruction for piece of shit x86/windows machines.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 1
x86 and Macs. I don't consider the model 100 a true laptop/notebook, just a portable. Besides, unless there were a desktop version (and it wasn't exactly backward compatible with the other tandy machines)... AIX laptop? Hmm, mind finding a url for me? I've already had to revise the list, some people turned up a few even I hadn't heard of.
#3 for me would be the sparcbooks, of course. #4 would be the Atari ST machines.
Now, since I've been made for the fool, here are the ones I didn't know.
#5 HP-UX/PArisc laptop. Seems to be legit, and available. There are of course workstation machines for this platform, and it meets all the modern laptop requirements that most would have.
#6 Acorn's RISCos, arm laptop (A4 ?). Screen looks kinda dinky, maybe even black and white, but the shape, usage, everything is there. Looks comparable with the early mac/x86 laptops at a glance.
C= never did make an amiga laptop, and homebrew doesn't count. Nor were there Alphabooks that I'm aware of (though there should have been). Did SGI ever bother to do a mips machine? Remember, the thing has to be battery powered, integrated display, and use the same OS/software as a desktop version of that platform. Are there any others?
PS Palmtop form factors don't count, even if they are now using those OSs in devices vaguely desktop-like.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
ncc74656
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· Score: 1
There was also an LCD available for the Apple IIc that made it somewhat more portable...that brings your count to six.
-- 20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
And the Acorn A4... an A5000 Archimedes in a notebook form factor. Where "notebook" = a 4lb hardbound notebook.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
John+Harrison
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· Score: 1
I think you have to count the Model 100. It was a true laptop. It was smaller than the modern Thinkpad that I am typing this on right now. Ran forever on 4 AA batteries. I don't see how the fact that there wasn't a desktop version is relevant to whether it is a legitmate laptop or a legitmate platform. I actually see people still using these things. Reporters love them. This makes me want to dig up the one we had...
I wasn't talking about an Amiga laptop, I was talking about the C=64 luggable. I only saw one in person once and it really shouldn't could as a laptop.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 1
AIX/PPC makes #7 then.
I love my Tandy machines, but I'm just not sure I can put it in that category. I'll have to think about it.
The c64 luggable I'm familiar with, and I agree it shouldn't count. If you do that, then all the fugly "lunchbox" computers count too, something I can't reconcile with what we expect of a laptop. As for me mentioning the Amiga, I was just running through the list of platforms. Of the 4 platforms ever marketed to consumers in a real way, I find it strange that the Amiga (distant 3rd) didn't do a laptop, but Atari (even more distant 4th) did. Interesting to find out that there were so many laptop versions of workstation class computers. That AIX link kicks ass, btw.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
andrewski
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· Score: 1
At my middle school (5th-8th grades) we had four sx-64s at the library that you could check out (along with innumerable other cool shit) and take home. Since myself and only two buddies were the sole interested parties, the library lady let us keep 'em indefinately.
THe 4" monitor was actually pretty nice with a Brazil-style frensel lens in front.
Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Are there any ARM notebooks?
Psion series 7 . I think it's the consumer version of their NetbookOk, strictly speaking it's a subnotebook - around the size of the Libretto.
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top *of the* slide.
Think about it - the next lines don't make sense if he's already slidden - "Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride, Till I get to the bottom and I see you again." And besides, the lyrics to all the songs were on the back of the poster that came with the album (vinyl).
For those who don't know, these are part of the lyrics from the Beatles' song, Helter Skelter (which, I've heard, was U.K. slang for a playground slide).
A helter skelter isn't slang for a playground slide, although it is a slide, it curves around a column and children ride down on coconut mats.
They should rename Babelfish...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
...to Yoda-fish
And his computer's first task....
by
AvantLegion
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· Score: 1
... was to play Wolfenstein-3D.
Do you have plans and parts list?
by
nounderscores
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· Score: 1
Tubes? If you can come up with the plans and parts list for a tube based computer and then post it as "build your own EMP proof computer!" You'd go into the hall of fame for sure! heck, I'm tempted to ask slashdot right now (I'll probably be rejected but you might have a shot.)
Wrong Section
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The whiny teenagers with computers their parents bought hang out in the Games section.
To make by own hands a standard computer
by
WetCat
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
... is plain stupid. It will be really cool if he, for example, created Basic or Tcl or Java or Prolog hardware interpreter machine, or tagged architecture machine, or parallel computer. Or a computer with no registers at all (all commands work with memory). It will be at least a little innovative...
Re:FIST POST
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
that's funny cus whoever modded that offtopic obviously falls under the 11rd category
They will never get old! Not until beowulf clusters no longer exist, anyways. Then, it's old news, and thus, old.
-- hey!
Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
mistermund
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· Score: 2, Informative
Back in my day I had to write games in BASIC, on a 4.7Mhz computer with no hard disk and 128K of RAM. And I was grateful
Heh. Back in high school we all had TI-83's. You can do a lot with 28k and BASIC given enough mind-numbing general classes and a spot near the back of the room. We got to the point where we could program those things blindfolded (those keypads were a tad awkward) One friend reimplemented Oregon Trail. Another did a 3D plotter and a window manager frontend with app launching. Course, when the rare teacher took to resetting calculators before exams, all that fine work was lost.;^) There was talk of modifying beepers for two way wireless communication.
I know that my story pales in comparison to most of the audience here, but that's how it was for me.
Re:Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
conradp
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· Score: 5, Funny
Heh. Back in high school we all had TI-83's. You can do a lot with 28k and BASIC given...
You think you had it bad with a TI-83? We would 'ave dreamed of having a TI-83! Our school had just one computer with only one bit of memory, and the only operation it could perform was XOR. We had to pass it around the class and hope that no one set the bit before it got to us!
We had to carve the stone input decks with our bare hands, then to reboot we'd have to stick the computer into a 240Volt socket and close the connection with our bare tongues!
But you tell that to kids these days, and they won't believe you.
-- "To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." -- Olin Miller
Re:Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
Drakonian
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· Score: 1
You think you had it bad with a TI-83? We would 'ave dreamed of having a TI-83! Our school had just one computer with only one bit of memory, and the only operation it could perform was XOR. We had to pass it around the class and hope that no one set the bit before it got to us!
Holy shit that was funny. Nice work, there are tears streaming down my face.
-- Random is the New Order.
Re:Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
Verteiron
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· Score: 1
You should've bought a TI-85. They were out before the 83s, were vastly more powerful and just generally kicked all kinds of ass.. you could even program z80 assembly on 'em with the right set of hacks. I wrote a Scorched Earth clone in the ti-basic language.. you talk about sloooooow... drawing those trajectories as a graphing function... and yet, somehow, still fun...
-- End of lesson. You may press the button.
Re:Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You think you had it bad with a TI-83? We would 'ave dreamed of having a TI-83! Our school had just one computer with only one bit of memory, and the only operation it could perform was XOR. We had to pass it around the class and hope that no one set the bit before it got to us!
You had ONEs and ZEROs??? Lucky dog - all we had were zeros!
Re:Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You had ONEs and ZEROs??? Lucky dog - all we had were zeros!
That is what you call a half bit bus, right?
Re:Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
Matchu
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· Score: 1
He adapted Four Yorkshiremen, the classic Python sketch. Did a bang-up job of it, too.
Re:Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I built a program on my Ti 85 that ran and allowed the teacher to "delete" the memory to get around that.
Workshop In Computer Construction
by
slasho81
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· Score: 1
Forbidden
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.:)
-- --
Do you have plans and parts list?-"Shocking" past.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
" Tubes? If you can come up with the plans and parts list for a tube based computer and then post it as "build your own EMP proof computer!" You'd go into the hall of fame for sure! heck, I'm tempted to ask slashdot right now (I'll probably be rejected but you might have a shot.)"
Well it's getting near the 10 post limit, and the beds calling, but I could proably do it. The hard part is the tubes (maybe pixie)[1]. I'd be more worried about the/. crew killing themselves on the high voltages (ask anyone who's worked on a tube amp). I'm just imagining the power meter making out like a ufo when I switch it on.:)
[1] I should say very hard. Just ask the FAA. And you thought NASA had it bad.
Can somebody post the pages if u have downloaded
the link is gone
thx
Your site. OT, but I don't care.
by
moncyb
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· Score: 1
Fuck you AT&T and shove your port 80 blocks up your ass!
Ah Yeah! Great site.
The "Meta" is interesting, but will there be any advantages over Freenet? Though merging the two together may work out nicely. The thing is, I don't see how they'll stop ISPs (like AT&T BB--soon to be comcast) from blocking services. Won't they eventually just block all connections except outgoing to their mail servers and web proxies? Do you see WiFi as a potential local solution?
Re:Your site. OT, but I don't care.
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 1
Meta's advantage is that it's a generic tcp/ip network. 10,000+ applications/services already run on that. Meta+freenet is even stronger...
If they start proxying off the net completely, I don't know what could be done. Wifi is completely local, and easy prey for law enforcement... especially in an enviroment which has condoned ISPs blocking everything except email and their web proxies. If that were to happen, we'd have to delve into science fiction for answers... I doubt someone will invent a quantum entanglement transciver in their basement, though.
Seems like we might manage to tunnel traffic over HTTP, if they weren't truly proxying/caching the web content.
Re:Your site. OT, but I don't care.
by
moncyb
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· Score: 1
As to Wifi and police. I don't think they'll care if you are not doing anything which is actually illegal. Even if you do illegal things, they probably won't even pay much attention...unless you do a lot of ranting with threats to kill many people.;-)
The corporations won't be able to do much. They'll either have to find the exact position of your Wifi spot to serve a legal notice or try to disrupt your signal (probably get them in trouble with the FCC).
As to proxies and blocking, in most countries the ISPs seem to be doing this on their own. I doubt the police would care if you somehow made your own network. Maybe if your neighbors are really cool, you could all string some 10baseT cable to each other's houses/apartments. Have a neighborhood intranet. You'd have to be doing some wild things for any outsider to notice you.
Yeah, the solutions I suggest wouldn't protect you from the police, but if you're not doing crazy shit or something, then they may likely ignore you. You would only be able to comunicate locally, but something is better than nothing.
The corps probably wouldn't even be able to find you, let alone censor you if they did, which seemed to be part of your goal for Meta. However, having to deal with total internet blockout is an extreme situation and may not happen. Even so, if you can start your own ISP, then it may solve some of the problems. I've thought about trying it, but I am not sure how to start my own business--maybe it should be some sort of coop?
Re:Your site. OT, but I don't care.
by
NoMoreNicksLeft
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· Score: 1
Everything you say is reasonable enough. But there are some slight problems, all the same.
The police will respond, when corps complain that you sent MP3s, or use some copyright or trademark of theirs. Or at least they will, when the judges asks them to enforce a court order.
As for hoping that you're network presence will be mundane/boring enough, that no one will care... good luck. The PCI list website was attacked... and all that guy did was host a list of vendor/card IDs, to make writing open source device drivers easy. What about when some halfass CEO decides that your domain name is trademark infringement, even when you were using it long before they ever started using theirs?
Wifi is really only local. When they do find out, you're within a few miles of their narc. It sounds dumb, but police are good at their job. Something these asshat hackers never realize... investigation is something they excel at. Even if its just canvasing the area, looking for someone that fits a profile. But even if you can protect it from legal attacks, and law enforcement attacks... you and a few hundred of your neighbors are a poor substitute for a truly global network with thousands, tens of thousands of users.
can't believe it....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Imagine a Beowulf clus..... oh, never mind
Here's the translation cleaned up
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I am conscious to me [I am aware]
that it is a rather moved [disturbed] idea
to build itself its own CCU [to construct my own CPU]
but perhaps give it of people which I can animate by this website to something similar [but perhaps this website will induce people to do something similar]
or which even my CCU to copy to want [or even desire to copy my CPU].
I will make everything available on this side gradually, which is needed for the reproduction of the CCU.[I will gradually make available all the information necessary for the construction of this CPU.]
Re: Build Your Own Computer
by
AliasMoze
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· Score: 1
All I want to know is how this relates to THE MATRIX RELOADED.
According to this site, a P5 has 3.1 million transistors. Assuming an average size of a discrete transistor package at 4mm x 3mm, that would require an area of at least 37.2(m^2) - or a square board measuring ~6.1m on each edge.
And that's discounting passive components and assuming that you can squeeze the wiring between the gaps.
For comparison, using the same assumptions, a P4 would require a square board measuring ~22.5m on each edge [504(m^2) area].
I'll leave it to someone else to work out the power requirements, and how reliable it would be with all those heat-generating components packed so closely together.
--
The More Interesting Thing is...
by
Frogmanalien
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· Score: 2, Insightful
People don't get their hands dirty anymore. It's a lost art- children (admittedly before my time) use to fiddle with electronics, take things apart, build something new. There was a lot to discover, a lot of flexibility. Components could be coupled together in very different ways. Now, when a kid tells me he's built a PC, big whoop- he stuck some boards into slots, plugged some cables in. What's missing, and may stunt future growth- are products that can be disassembled easily- and rebuilt or modified... I once built a record player out of cardboard, wax and and an old motor. It palyed good for about five minutes, but then went up in flames. I learnt a lot from that- but if I start to build something based on a current digital tech it's impossible- my stereo is one chipboard- what can kids do with that?
The future of science depends on us being able to make new areas exciting and visible to kids- quantum mechanics and splitting atoms remains impossible for 5 year olds.
Congraulations to this guy- he's done a good job- but please, think of the children...!
-- The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency (Eugene McCarthy)
Re:The More Interesting Thing is...
by
Punk+Walrus
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· Score: 1
> start to build something based on a current digital tech it's
> impossible- my stereo is one chipboard- what can kids do with that?
Huh. That's the very same complaint said among today's Lego enthusiasts. "Too many specialized pieces." But that's just bollocks. I mean, if you really want to, you'll do it. Even if you have to use coconuts, palm fiber, and metal smelted from minerals extracted from sea water: you'll find the way if your will is strong enough. I bet, right now, some kid out there took apart a discarded cell phone (a "specialized" piece), and is playing with the chips, trying to decode how they work.
This guy's site is proof the concept is still alive. I bet when people said, "Why do you do this? They already have VGA cards! What a waste of time..." he didn't even hear them.
Why? Because we can.
__________________________________________________ _____
www.punkwalrus.com - "One of the biggest trainwrecks of journals" - Benny
Re:The More Interesting Thing is...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yeah yeah, so I'm anonymous coward;-) I'm too lazy to make myself an account. heh.
In any case, I've spent a fair amount of shower-time pondering that.. like wouldn't it be neat to live in the era of the PDP or something when you could rewrap a board if there was a bug.. but then I realise that if you have the same know-how today, you can still do this. And it might take a bit longer to learn, but you have all the knowledge of those who came before you, adn the net to help you out. So I figure it pretty much equals out.. unless you have to deal with surface mount. Ugh:)
00 The ones that understand trinary 01 those who don't 02 people who mistake it for binary. 10 And people who repeat the joke without realising there should be four options.
Atually no there shouldn't... 10 types of people means we either start from 01 or stop counting at 02..
The off-by-one bug strikes again..
-- 455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
'correctly'?
by
Trepidity
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's simply a convention. Of the six possible ways to arrange month, day, and year, three are in widespread use: mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy, and yy/mm/dd (yy might be yyyy as well).
The US standard makes sense in some ways: mm/dd is what you commonly write, with an implicit year (though this used to be more true in the past). This is in the normal sense-making big-endian format (rather than the crazy European little-endian format). Then when you want to denote the year explicitly you tack it into the end. This is admittedly a bad place for it -- it really should go on the front, but it makes sense in a way, since it's being tacked on as an annotation. I.e. "It's 12/24. In 2003." That makes sense, whereas "The year is 2003. It's 12/24." doesn't really.
Maybe you do, but I write "7 June" not "June 7". And when I am saying it it would be "seventh of June" and not "June seventh".
Your above statement is a circular argument.
Re:'correctly'?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Don't be ridiculous. Going from either high to low or the other way round is obviously what's logical here. IOW, yy/mm/dd or dd/mm/yy. Mixing them the US way is arcane and stupid. Calling it "logical" is worse than an insult.
Re:'correctly'?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
also note the American convention to miss out important linking words. This is why they say "September 5th" when other countries say "5th of September".
For example, "the senator announced new funding Wednesday" as opposed to the more accurate "the senator announced new funding on Wednesday" or even better "On Wednesday, the senator announced new funding...".
The same goes with using "write" as a verb. Sure, there's nothing wrong with "I'll write that" or "I have written a program", etc, but "write me" is a statement instructing you to create a person's essense using words. "write me", "write an essay", "write 'here' right now". What is really meant is "write to me", because we have missed out the implicit thing that is being written. The person is not being written, a letter is being written to that person. "Write [a letter] to me".
Then there's that new trend of using twisted grammar as a fashion statement, "I am so not liking that". That's like Shakespeare's great play, "As you are liking it". Or "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less", which is WRONG! The kids wanted a fresh, new, ironic way of saying that cliched old insult. The old insult was good enough; "I care so little about this already, it is completely impossible to care less about it" -> "I couldn't care less". "I could care less" is the opposite; "I could easily care less about this, I already care quite a lot about it. In fact, it's quite important to me." -> "I could care less.". If they were smart, they could've recycled the insult as "I could care more". That way it would be fresh and new, and actually be insulting instead of just stupid.
Could not resist...
by
leomekenkamp
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· Score: 1, Funny
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
-- Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
This are (could be?) the times...
by
kju
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· Score: 4, Informative
DIY electronics seems to be dying and i can't really understand why. I recently made some research for a own project and i came to the conclusion that it nowadays it is easier to design some decent hardware than ever before.
No more fiddling with a bunch of TTL/CMOS logic chips. You can get a programmable CPLD with 800 logic gates for 99 us cents (e.g. from xilinx). Free design software (also said to be running under linux with wine) is available too. 800 gates is enough for some really nice projects. In circuit programmable.
Or try a cheap controller. For example AVR RISC. They are fast, they are powerful, they can be programmed with a gcc-variant. Just take the chips a oscillator and go. Programmable with a cheap parport interface. Oh, and the best is the price: Starting at US$2.
Soldering it on a experimental board? Maybe, but what about designing a pcb? Take EAGLE as layout software (freeware version for non commercial use up to 1/2 eurocard, enough for some decent design). Get the pcb fabricated for example in hungary (US$21 for a whole eurocard, all inclusive).
So i hope we will see a return of home development. It is getting even cheaper and more powerful. I just read an announcement for a new FPGA with 1 million (!) gates which target price is under US$20. This is enough to even construct your own CPU. Wouldn't that be fun and educative?
So see the possibilities and go out and design something. And probably make the design available under some open license. The time has never been better before.
Re:This are (could be?) the times...
by
jez9999
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· Score: 1
Why??? Maybe times have moved on, and people are too busy trying to code viable opensource alternatives to Windows before vendor lock-in ensues. I think that's a far more vital issue that circuitboards. Let's face it, you're not gonna take down the Intel/AMD duopoly, and modern PCs are orders of magnitude more useful than any home-brewed cirtuitboard. Put simply: why code for a circuitboard when you can code for a PC?
Re:This are (could be?) the times...
by
HeyLaughingBoy
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· Score: 1
Put simply: why code for a circuitboard when you can code for a PC?
Because that circuit board may be doing things you PC can't dream of... like running on 3 AA cells. Or like fitting into a small corner of your pocket, or controlling fuel injection and ignition in your formerly carburetted VW, or controlling the robot walking up the basement stairs... Office-automation type desktop PC programming is (to me) at best somewhat interesting; embedded systems is where the real fun starts! Now combine a PC and a machine full of motors and solenoids and the code gets truly sexy. Used to be I couldn't believe I got paid to come to work every day!
Re:This are (could be?) the times...
by
thebigmacd
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· Score: 1
Because a circuit board is yea-long by yea-wide and consumes X amount of power. While you are at it, build your own power supply. Now shove it underneath the dashboard of your car beside the ECU and you have custom vehicle-tracking for when it gets stolen. Or any other nifty thing that you dont really need a laptop for.
I always thought it was SNOTTY-nosed. But maybe the others only make sense to the British.
-- Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
Memory?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Maybe he did his own CPU circuit (KEWL) or his own VGA card (EVEN KEWLER), but how did he build memory? Did he build flipflops or tubes? Isn't that *very* expensive (arsenicum, germanium, gallium) and error-prone??? I can't imagine him using off-the-shelf dimms, dram or sram (build-your-own-super-computer)
The /. effect en Deutsche
by
ectoraige
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· Score: 1
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
Unfortunately, Google's cache is empty, and it hasn't made it onto the wayback machine either...
Anybody grab a copy?
-- Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
Slashdotted translation!
by
nunofgs
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· Score: 4, Funny
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
which roughly translates to: all your base are belong to slashdot
Re:too bad
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Apart from the fact that it's impossible to build anything even approximating what intel and amd put out (unless you own your very own fab, which I somehow think unlikely), there's also that CPU design has evolved in the last two decades. Most people can easily understand how a Z80 or 8088 works, but try explaining the design of a p4 or athlon to someone, and you'll get a lot of blank stares.
I know I flunked computer design the first time I took it as part of my CS course. I simply didn't understand all the intricate details of pipelining.
Can people like me still learn to speak languages fluently?
Yes. Immersion is the most effective way and maybe the most stressfull way too (not necessarily a bad thing). I met an Aussie in the Guangxi provence in China. He spoke Chinese fluently. Turns out he started doing work in China in the mid-80's in the Gobi desert... not too many English speakers there. He basically had to learn Chinese in order to feed himself. He said that was a great motivator.
More practical is a style of language study called the Pimsleur Method. There is no reading involved, no written studies at all. Paul Pimsleur's premise is that you can learn a new language the same way you learned your first, by hearing, speaking and repetition. I bought the Mandarin Chinese 30 lesson set (for about US $350) and its worked pretty well for me. You can pick up sample packs at many local book/music stores that contain the first 6 or 8 lessons for a reasonable price that can be applied to the whole course purchase if it works for you.
Even so, you must use your new language or it will never set and/or you'll lose it.
Voice-Over (Marge) "It was the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month... we were meeting to discuss the misprint in the school calendars"
Homer (Grumbling): "...Lousy smarch weather..."
Soon very much needed skills
by
unoengborg
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· Score: 1
Perhaps we all need to build our own stuff to stay free when Palladium (or whatever it's called these days) are built into every chip made by all major chip vendors.
-- God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Re:Do you have plans and parts list?-"Shocking" pa
by
vermicious
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· Score: 1
oh and besides, it'd be 15 feet tall and weigh 2 and a half tons... and thats the portable.
Mod up
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'd totally forgotten Kilgore Trout - man, that makes me feel 15 again...
Achtung!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Verboten Sie haben nicht Erlaubnis/ mycpu-g.htm zugÃnglich zu machen auf diesem Bediener.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80
Logic gates!!!!
by
HarveyBirdman
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· Score: 0, Troll
Build one out of old relays. *Then* I'll be impressed.
-- ---
Ban humanity.
But can it make toast?
by
nounderscores
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· Score: 1
I think that I'd want the lan party to come to the Big Box.
(Cold cathodes?! HAH!)
I mean a Big Box vacuum tube computer could be a great educational tool! all the parts are human servicable size and it brings Das Blinken Lights back to the world of computing.
Run the cooling system and computer off diesel generators which are also emp proof and be the envy of your neighbours.
Also, I don't think ANYBODY has implemented an Ethernet card in valves before.
Cmon! You could even prevent people frying themselves by posting "You must have somebody with EE degree majoring in high voltage on your team before attempting these plans" in big friendly letters all over the plans.
It'll be fun.
OT
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
We were trying to prove the possiblity of new course for the collage
Ah, how I miss the days of good ol' collage- that random gathering of a mish-mash of mishapen minds that somehow made a nice pretty pattern...
Also taught alot about low and high logic.
High logic- is that like when I try to argue with my friend about basic economics after he's thoroughly wasted?
Babelfish-ified Error Messages
by
suwain_2
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
How I love Babelfish.:)
-- ________________________________________________
suwain_2:: quality slashdot p
Re:Babelfish-ified Error Messages
by
suwain_2
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· Score: 1
This one is obviously 'staged,' but Slashdot's 404 error, translated to Korean and back:
404 files which it does not discover
The URL which is demanded (404 fruits) it did not discover.
If you it feel, URL in the place where the ya comes to from the pater@slashdot.org, right song.
-- From here
-- ________________________________________________
suwain_2:: quality slashdot p
Re:Babelfish-ified Error Messages
by
poppycat
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· Score: 1
Mine was more urgent. I guess its scared of girls:(
Emergency Found
The requested URL/mycpu g.htm which emergency found on this servers.
-- When they discover the centre of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it.
Other FPGA CPU projects
by
nutznboltz
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was, I think, the first computer built completely of chips - and all the chips were the same, 3 input NOR gates (http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/ic/medium/002.html ).
I'd like to see the complete design and build one of those! Where does one buy ferrite cores nowadays?
Power requirements would be slightly elevated. Let's assume double the power consumption, what is that around 400W max? So for the P4 we would be using 400W in a 504 square meter area. Thats about 0.8W/m^2. If there are 250 x 333 transistors in that area, or about 83K transistors, each would use about 10uW per device. Even if the "device" started using 400KW the power dissipation per device would be a measly 10mW. No, the transistors would not be generating a great deal of heat.
Now consider how many clock cycles would be used going from corner to corner. Let's make it a 1G processor for the fun of it. The square is about 31m diagonally. At the speed of light that can be crossed in about 100ns. A single clock cycle at 1G is 1ns, so synchronization would get very interesting.
-- Sig is on vacation
Have you ever seen "Home Alone" or "Chocolate" ?
by
dorfsmay
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· Score: 1
Making people speak with an accent to make them another nationality is a very American thing.
Sorry long post (rant), but this is one of my my pet peeve....
Have you seen the movie "Chocolate" ? Actors talking english with a french accent, so that we know that they are in France !! Well I spent a lot of time in France, and people there tend to speak french, not english with a french accent !!
Have you seen "Home Alone" ? The funniest movie ever. I don't mean for the plot, but when they get to the airport in France, nobody in the whole airport speaks french with a french accent, all the supposed french people have a heavy american accent, that is so funny !! Especially that it is obvious that the airport part of the movie was made in France (you can recognize CDG, which I think would be quite difficult to re-construct in a studio)... I believe there are 55 million or so people who speak french with a fench accent in France, you'd think it'd be easier to hire a couple of them, rather than fly somebody in to speak with an american accent !!
the English number system (what we SAY) is based on value. you don't day eleventh when the VALUE is only 3. you say third.
mormon.
Re:Have you ever seen "Home Alone" or "Chocolate"
by
FireBreathingDog
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· Score: 1
Well, the problem with the solution you propose is that it would require being in the proximity of actual French people, which has certain olfactory drawbacks.
I _did_ build a computer once, but I have no great personal merit - it was a kit. A Sinclair Spectrum clone, back in the early 90's. I still got to solder the Z80 CPU, the memory chips, all of the glue logic, the I/O chips etc. Worked like a charm, but the CPU kept overheating and after a while I'd get weird errors. This was, you see, before the age of heatsinks and fans for computer chips (the 'modern' CPU at the time was Intel's 386). I eventually got another CPU and replaced the first one, and the problem with overheating went away. Must have been a bad part.
I think I still have that machine somewhere, although I haven't seen it or used it for well over 5 years.
-- I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
And did anyone hand in a 1-instuction CPU...
by
iamacat
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· Score: 1
When presented with this particular course project. For unawares, the instuction does:
if ((*addr1 - *addr2) < 0) goto addr3;
No opcode is needed, just 3 words. The professor was pretty mad, but the "CPU" did run all the sample programs. Multiplication subroutine is left as an excersize to the reader.
Now the cool thing is that you shouldn't need a factory, FPGA or anything like that to make this CPU, just a soldering iron and some transistors. Anything like that out there?
Weird "Forbidden" error... lol!
by
Jugalator
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· Score: 1
I think we managed to Slashdot his site or something, but the funny part was that I used that Babelfish link and got this:
Forbidden
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpug.htm on this servers.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80
Hmm, I'll interpret that like that there's a ton of access on his server.:-)
-- Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Re:Weird "Forbidden" error... lol!
by
WebMasterJoe
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· Score: 1
Oddly enough, this isn't the typical message for slashdotted servers. Usually it's some sort of timeout, either on behalf of the server itself, or otherwise in the form of an asp ("Site owner has not paid enough money to MS to allow this many connections') or php ("30 second request time exceeded") timeout message.
The "Forbidden" message usually means that either the directory is symlinked from the http document directory, or a file doesn't have read access for everybody (or the httpd process owner). To me, it looks like somebody ran "chmod 700" on this file because they didn't want to pay for that much bandwidth. In other words, they commited suicide before the slashdot army could knock them offline.
i do believe i've read somewhere that we have the ability to build a base 10 computer... but i don't know how that would be done. would everything transferred as light and stored as something weird?
i thought it was rather the opposite
by
Trepidity
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· Score: 1
I've noticed far more Europeans leaving out important linking words, especially when writing dates. Americans will usually write "September 5th," whereas it's not at all uncommon to see Europeans write "5 September," as in "I'd like to schedule a meeting for 5 September if no one has any conflicts," something you'd never see an American write.
As for "write me," that's standard English, and there are many other verbs used similarly. You can say "sing me a song," or "give me your wallet," or "help me," and such usage dates back at least to the previous century.
It's worse than that.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I've had a few cunning plans over the years, but 90% of the time, the electronics vendors won't even return an email. It's damn hard to DIY when you can't even get the basic components.
Corporations view us as "consumers" not as customers, and certainly not as people - so you better get used to no more DIY techy-stuff. Unless your idea of DIY is a run of 5000, that is.
00 is not a value. that's like saying "there are zero types of people, people" when that really means there is 1 type of people. that's 4 options for "3 types of people"
It's already worth HALF what it was yesterday
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It's already worth HALF what it was yesterday, like anything else made from silicon. Except boob jobs. What is the fasination of american women with big oddly-shaped boobs?
Re:It's already worth HALF what it was yesterday
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I don't think it's American _women's_ fascination that is driving that particular industry...
Yeah, but anyway. "people who think they know binary, but don't" is a subset of "people who don't know binary"
Perhaps there's 100 kinds of people;
00 - people who don't know binary, and know it.
01 - people who think they know binary, but actually don't.
10 - people who think they don't know binary, but actually do..
11 - people who do know binary.
-- 455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Build Your Own Green Rosetta !
by
kilimangaro
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· Score: 2, Funny
Build Your Own Green Rosetta !
Ho... So sad i've got this one on the late....
i think i should get a +5 funny:)
-- "Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." - Nietzsche
Actually, it _IS_ pretty sad, when you think about it. Phenolic resin (bakelite) is easy enough for one person to make. Solder is relatively simple to make from refined lead/tin. Even from ore it's not especially difficult. Electricity is the easiest of all. Just put up a windmill, or build a heliostat.
wrong, Intel donated a Pentium 2 fab to the University of Illinois.
Hypothetically speaking, you could make your own pentium class 32-bit processor, but the issue is that it would require many man-years of design work unless you copied other designs. I'ts not worth the effort when you could just go work for intel and be doing something productivive.
This guy is hard core. Look at his parts list: NAND gates, NOR gates.
<voice="granny" type="indian"> Pah! All that I could make at home, with some silicon, some geraniums and a small aubergine.</voice>
-- Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Another home made CPU project
by
nytes
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· Score: 1
I came into this late, so not many/.'ers will see this.
Here is a site I've been watching for a couple of months. This guy is building his own mini-computer using TTL chips.
-- -- I have monkeys in my pants.
He must be an assembler programmer...
by
boy_afraid
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· Score: 1
He built his own PC from actuall PCB boards, circuit chips, layed is own circuits down, and even manufactured his own CPU. It looks like he even created his own OS and some simple graphics to show off his hardware. I assume this guy has no social life whatsoever and is still a virgin.
But, why the hell would he want to build this when it is easier to get the parts and build it himself. But this argument would be comparable to being a PC modder. Why would you build and/or construct your own mods when you can buy them pre-made. I prefer to build my own mods with my dremel and a little imagination and ingenuity.
Slashdot Mirror
My Hovercraft is full of eels!
I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched.
Do you waaaaant...do you waaaaaant...to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait 'til lunchtime.
Undergrads at most universities build their own CPUs. It's just a matter of coughing up the $$ to fabricate them.
pretty neat. I wonder how my P4 3.1ghz (overclocked) (1gb ram) would compare. I bet I'd get beat ;)
From the article: "The MyCPU system can be operated also in the C64-Mode, with a screen resolution of 80x25"
Sweet. Let's see if he can get Elevator Action running on that thing...
...A German housefire injures a computer hacker working on a weird project. Noone else was hurt.
-- welcome on my homepage --
On this side would like I mean built CCU to present, I call her " MyCPU ".
If you should see on the left of no menu, then click here .
I am conscious to me that it is a rather moved idea to build itself its own CCU but perhaps give it of people, which I can animate by this Website to something something similar or which even my CCU to copy to want. I will make everything available on this side gradually, which is needed for the reproduction of the CCU.NEWS: The MyCPU system as the first discrete Web server: software >TCP/IP
Technical data of the CCU:
Technical structure approx.. 50 logic ICs (74HCxx and 7ÃCxx), 7 EPROMS, 5 plates in the euro format Current supply simple 5V supply, power input smaller than 250 mA Architecture 8 bits DATA, 16 bits addresses, similarly Harvard Speed 5 MHz, dependent on the speed of the used EPROMS Program memory maximally 64kb addressable ROM Data memory maximally 64kb addressable RAM or I/O Register Hardware: 5 multi-function registers, 1 constant register. Software (current Microcode implementation): 1 accumulator, 2 index registers, 1 stack pointer Arithmetic High-speed aluminum, needs only maximally three clocks per operation. Logical speed: approx.. 0,5 million multiplications per second, which is faster than 8051 based Microcontroller count can. Interrupt 1 maskable interrupt, RESET Stack 256 byte stack in the conventional memory (0100h-01FFh), programmable stack pointer Addressierungsmodi 14 addressing modes: immediate 16bit, immediate 8-bits, immediate zeropage, direct absolute, direct zeropage, direct absolute plus index, indirect absolute, indirect zeropage, indirect absolute plus index, indirect zeropage plus index, indirect plus index absolute, absolute pointers 16bit, absolute pointers 8-bit, immediate of register Command sentence 256 OI codes, on the average 10.5 clocks per instruction Feature By small modification of the hardware and another Microcode it is possible to copy other CPUs (e.g. 6502)----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Last change: 16.10.2002
fit to print! That's my slashdot!
That sounds like a fun project, but I'm wondering how much it cost to do. I found this (from his "about me" page) somewhat interesting: Since June 2002 I work now at a large electronics company in Bremen, and to mine dream job there found.
> I am conscious to me that it is a rather moved idea to build itself its own CCU With the hardware prices being so low at present - it IS a "moved" idea to build your own "CCU".
Say that 3 times fast. Go ahead, I dare ya.
The site is short on (understandable) details, but the thing apparently runs at a blistering 5Mhz which happens to be 5Mhz faster than anything I could ever build. Impressive, but I don't think AMD and Intel should be worried just yet. Via
I remember playing with this stuff in VLSI. It's quite another thing to actually lay it out on hardware and wire the sucker up. He designed his own ALU, register paths, everything. God, and I can barly find time to play with my Mindstorms kit.
Macht Spass Jung!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Sorry, someone was gonna ask, so it might as well be me. :-)
Holy 1970 Batman! The fiend has built his own computer! What nefarious plans he must have?
if he were dead.
This guy has too much time on his hands.
So it all goes downhill from here?
beowulf cluster of those!!
By small modification of the hardware and another Microcode it is possible to copy other CPUs (e.g. 6502)
Didn't steve wozniack use the 6502 back when he made the apple ][. Hell overall, i bet you steve used less chips too. With the technology we have today i'm sure steve could've designed an insane system for what it cost him back then.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
What a wimp. He didn't even make his own monitor!
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
How many more hours until NetBSD is ported? Or has it finally merged with OpenBeOS to become BeSD? Has this been abandoned?
If the author is reading this: Good job; I hope to be able to do that some day.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
This is cool--don't get me wrong. But I fail to see anything here except that this guy will likely land dozens of job offers.
The Political Programmer
I think he wrote a thesis on it.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
I remember dreaming my own CPU with bit slice logic. In fact, I'm pretty sure I can find some BYTE photocopies and other notes from my first attempt in like 1980, or so.
I remember dreaming of building cards to hook to an S100 bus, including a Z-80 CPU with a ROM and redirection logic.
I mean, I can see how things change. It's kind of interesting to see a whole generation of hardware hackers think in terms of gate arrays, or their children. Who never smelt solder.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
in High school. Even wrote his own Bios.
Board of people (teacher and people from community) gave him a C for his effort.
I can't wait for this guy to write his 3DMark03.exe optimized drivers for the VGA card ;) Then we'll have something..
This guy still spends less time at a computer than most SlashDot users.
The Political Programmer
This is a typical double-E undergrad computer architecture design project. Or are other schools falling so far behind (I go a public school, and FAR from being the top student) that this stuff stands out as impressive?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Even if your taking advantage of free university resources, your not going to be able to make anything that comes close to an athlon. That would put this into what we call, "just something to do".
to run minix and apache. the poor thing has probably melted itself into oblivion..
At least the war on the environment is going well
Does it run Linux. Wow! It does? Imagine a beowulf cluster of those. Wait...5 MhZ. Um, nevermind.
"I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
You can build your own CPU in and FPGA these days and run linux on it..... Though a big FPGA isn't exactly cheap.
Anyway, most of us that went through college engineering programs did something similar to this at one time. Whether it was building a computer out of parts or designing and architecture in VHDL and throwing it with some assembly code on an FPGA. It is a good way to learn how architectures really work.
Maybe I'm missing something here ... but I don't see anything at all about a VGA card here. Looks like it only has serial and LCD interfaces.
I'd have a hard time believing someone could make a complete VGA card out of discrete logic... No way you could get the necessary speed.
"...dass es eine ziemlich verrückte Idee ist..."
GENAU!
Well, I don't think anyone is going to be trying to top my sig for a while. Hard to do much better than: You had a microprocessor? I had to fab my CPU out of discrete components and develop my own microcode, assembly routines, and C compiler.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It will "suck more"? In that it can't run your beloved Windows XP? You act as if this is even comparable to an Athlon, nothing done even as a college level compsci project with a $500 FPGA could hope to outperform such. It isn't the point at all. As for "worth the trouble", you seem to imply that any learning or hobby not pursued because it's obvious that it will be rewarded in the next 10 seconds is unjustifiable.
Me, I'd love to design my own little CPU, if I could even figure out how to manage even the simplest VHDL code. $100 books that have to be ordered, and nothing on the web kind of puts the damper on that. What's your excuse? You don't care how the magic video game box works?
I think that the point wasn't to make a cpu that would become something even comparable to those that you can buy from best buy or frys. It was to see, hey can I build a cpu?
"welcome on my website" That's nice. Welcome on my post. "Build Your Own Computer" Wow! You can?! Amazing. Incredible. This guy deserves an award. Wait...I built one three years ago. Sorry, but you're about 30 years late. P.S. Yes I know that it was translated in Babelfish.
"I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
I don't see why it's not worth the trouble; I'd love to figure out how to build my own CPU and actually know something useful instead of how to seat all the magic bits on a board and then smack the power button to see if it comes up, like most "hardware hackers" these days. Oh, I forgot, you cut a window and put a blinky light inside your case.
Pehhh! This is nothing. I'm building my own CPU by only using transistors... (ehemm! and, resistors and capacitors off course)
big deal. intel built their own CPU. so did AMD. IBM built their own computer. So did HP.
i'm not bad mouthing this guy in any way, mind you. I'm just saying this is not news.
So is this thing pipelined? Branch-prediction? Speculative execution? How about a cache-consistency protocol? Darn, no out-of-order execution or completion units? I expected a tuned a 4-way SMP NUMA box w/ 128MB of on-die cache and dual-ported RAM. I coulda made that w/ light-switches, solar cells and duck-tape. ;)
Once in comp arch class, we were asked on a final to design a 32-bit pipelined microprocessor out of twigs and bits of string. Beat that! JK. It just seems people have too much free time nowadays, whatever happened to the 90 hr work-week and sub-standard working conditions?
Silly, a few PALs and an FPGA would be alot cheaper, and there's even specs from Altera how to make a VGA or TV composite output single. Heck you can built your own programmer, and altera gives away the dev tools for free; less parts, less hassle. All you need is 2x the amount of ram you want for a framebuffer, and you can do synchronous double-buffering to avoid having dual-ported or SGRAM/WRAM.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
they should never have a translation for chinese, spanish, french, portuguese, italian, etc, etc, quit looking for an excuse to be an elitist ass. btw, i speak english, and spanish fluently, and am learning french.
But can I play Quake on it?
Seriously, though, I like that he added the LCD status display. Most people would just use the video for display, but after having worked on boxes with those on board LCDs for status info, I've learned to love em.
Yes, but plugging a computer chip into a slot on the motherboard isn't very educational.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks only one language?
An American, damnit.
Besides, we all know from Star Trek that when we meet the aliens, that's what they'll all be speaking anyway.
Carthago delenda est!
Crackers making crackers! Film at 11...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
While I really want to believe that this guy is hosting this site on a computer with a homemade 5 mhz cpu, netcraft claims otherwise.
The site kuschel.citybug.de is running Apache/1.3.20 (Linux/SuSE) PHP/4.2.2 mod_perl/1.26 FrontPage/4.0.4.3 on Linux.
There is a reason that the site was not down after the 15th hit in a minute...
There are 11 types of people-Those who know binary,those who don't,and those who laugh cus they think they do but don't.
This is way off topic, and pretty technical, but shouldn't "those who think they do but don't" be of type "those who don't"?
Then there really are only 10 types of people.
It's all about inheritance
Still a good sig though.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
I Imagine that before the s'mores are grilled (graham crackers, hershey bars & marshmallows) he will have a king sized bed made out of duck down, a T.V. made out of acorns, and an air conditioner made out of discarded spam cans.
Wonder if he is single? I have a lovely niece.
What am I saying? Of course he is single.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
All I need is some soothing music, some candles, a woman, nine months, and I can build my own awesome "computer" that runs on a neural network, billions of neurons running simultaneously.
...
Unfortunately this is Slashdot, so I have all the time in the world, but no woman
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
does it run linux?? har har har...
but seriously, don't you think this is a pretty big accomplishment for one person? i mean, i wasn't able to find the time it took him, but assuming it's not long, he managed to replicate technology that took 30 years in the first place! and did it all in probably less than a year. now sure, prior work is published and easily accessible but still. just the motivation of the guy to do this is unreal. who else here would do that for something that is basically useless except for "something to play with"? (though, toys are fun).
I write code.
A clear IP violation, I mean this was done in Job's garage first you know.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Back in the 1970's when I was a teenager, and the 8080 was the newest thing on the block. But I hated the stupid instruction set. Around that time, Heathkit sold my (almost) dream computer, a PDP 11/03 clone with a paper tape reader, that would have cost me 15 years of work on my paper route. I eventually bought just the manuals, which was all that I could afford. Eventually I bought a cheaper 6800 based kit they sold, with a whopping 512 bytes of RAM, but that is another story.
I had a lot of 7400 series TTL manuals handy however, and the reading the PDP manuals gave me a lot of hints as to what I wanted in my (then) dream CPU - a 16 bit instruction set, with lots of general purpose registers, lots of fancy addressing modes, a hardware multiplier/divider, and a much larger address space so I could run a real compiler - not that interpretive BASIC crap that was all the rage back then. (I kind of knew that even if I could bring my vision to life, writing a decent compiler would be even tougher than building the CPU, but one battle at a time....) I worked out the instruction set, and designed most of the ALU, although I got stuck on trying to make the divider work. I was also somewhat disappointed in that it appeared I wouldn't be able to get the damned thing to go any faster than about 12 MHz, the TTL wouldn't work any faster. I was also stuck on what to do for memory.
I couldn't go much beyond a paper design, the parts would have cost me close to $1000, not including the UV eraser and the PROM programmers. But it was still educational. I dropped the project for good when I saw the first 68000 datasheet. Here was the CPU I had been trying to design for the past 3 or 4 years. It had an nice instruction set a lot like the PDP, plenty of registers, plenty of indexed addressing modes, and a hardware integer multiplier/divider. In 1984 I bought my first "real" computer, a 128K "thin" Mac, which sported a 6MHz 68000, and to this day, still resides in my parents closet!
(The flyback xfmr burned out years ago, a common problem with the original macs)
My rights don't need management.
I don't know about that. Everyone around me gets a really good lesson in 4-letter vocubulary if I forget to put a static strap on and zap my new baby and/or part of the mainboard.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Sure I screwed up the Dixie flag decal and painted the interior the wrong color, but it looked pretty good. Yeah, it's been downhill from there. I don't even have a ball chair. Schwachbruestig indeed.
PS- If that word happens to infer that I like eating parrot turds then by "indeed" I meant "YAY KOOL-AID!".
"I remember playing with this stuff in VLSI. It's quite another thing to actually lay it out on hardware and wire the sucker up. He designed his own ALU, register paths, everything. God, and I can barly find time to play with my Mindstorms kit."
,disk controller. And yes we used assembler. And the previous semester used tubes. Ah the good ol days.
He he. Then I must have been hardcore because back in the '80s when I went for my EE. I had to build a computer from discrete parts. CPU took over a couple of breadboards, VGA
Original VGA was 640x480 256 colours, was it not? If I remember correctly: the original Amiga chip prototypes were built from discrete logic. Given the era, 74LSxx/4xxx was the limit of the parts available; yes, you could build "that fast a circuit', just not much faster. The limit of colours 32 vs 256 was a product of the speed of the DAC and DRAM, not the speed of the TTL components and there are many bandwidth tricks one can play to make even those practicable. Believe!
/. effect took over, he didn't.
The author didn't implement such a circuit though or at least from what I could decipher before the
Not that long ago we had to build a functioning RISC computer from logic ICs at Cal Poly Pomona. And not as a part of an EE program either--it was a part of the CS curriculum!
In all the time I spent there, that was one of the most interesting things I've ever done. Luckily for us, we didn't have to design and etch the boards, but we did have to come up with the microcode and burn it into EPROMs as well as solder a bunch of components and IC sockets onto said board. We also had to write an assembler for it as well and of course the whole thing had to work if you wanted to pass the course!
It was only capable of handling 4 bits at a time and was manually clocked (keep flipping faster! I need those spreadsheet values by tomorrow!) but by God the thing actually worked. And you could actually understand how it worked.
Even though you could conceivably expand the thing to 32 or 64 bits, I can't imagine why anyone would. Except of course if you're living in a post-apocalyptic (or post NGSCB) world where you can't walk into a store and buy one...
-- Shamus
This space for rent! EZ terms!
Jeri Ellsworth is building C1 (formerly the CommodoreOne) with no formal background in electrical engineering. It currently has a small, customized 6502 processor running inside a FPGA and it provides VGA output via a framebuffer also implemented in a FPGA.
yes, you're right. but i KNOW that there are hardcore people who think they get the "10 types of people" joke (which i hope everyone has seen before they read my 11 types of people), so they laugh even though they don't know binary. it does fall into the 10nd category.. so you're right. just my way of making fun of wanna be nerds
I just built my own motherboard out of two slices of whole wheat and PB&J. The CPU is made of raisins. And I've added bananas as coprocessors. Mmmmmmm delicious CPU ....
Better not mess with the Germans when it comes to serious, hardcore geekery. This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my life.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I suppose the RIAA etc are going to clamp down on this guy for building a new CPU that doesn't have DRM in it? Careful...
Has he been /.'ed already? Anyone got a mirror? Cached pages? Anything?
I got a +5, Troll
No, you didn't. Seriously, when are these jokes (a far stretch of the word) about beowulf clusters going to end...?
...are a more likely scenario
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
That said... It is pretty hard, and is something to be proud of. This guy's accomplishment is going past a basic fetch-ALU-store implementation and actually building something useful on top. Also, his documentation is superb. This last is a jewel beyond price in professional IT.
Making your own CPU has great pedagogical value too
Forbidden
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80
By mission ton. Kudos to babelfish.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpug.htm on this servers.
...or should that be: 403 Verboten!
That is the first combo insult, german insult and ebonics comment I've ever seen. Funny too. Please continue.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80 OK, this guy knows hardware. But has he ever heard of software, let alone upgrading it?
Hardware, software, documentation, all self done. wow !
I've designed a few CPUs back when I was in college, using 74xx ALUs, etc. Never acutally implemented one, though a friend did. What I have done is buy a bunch of used relays and had my teen-age children build full adders with them. Now that's fun. You get a real sense of accomplishment when you flip some switches, listen to the relays click, and see a row of light bulbs display the sum.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
this guy built his own computer, and it actually kicks ass. wow i made my first link!
On a project like this, I always roll my own electrons, none of that store-bought stuff.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I feel out-geeked. The best I can offer is programming an Altera gate array to plug in to a 68000 processorbus and be a DRAM controller.
Languages are almost as much fun as computers. But then I am one of those Weird Canadians who drove to work yesterday listening to a Russian CD (Tatu, 200 po vstrechnoi) and a French one (Liane Foly, Reve Orange).
...laura
And powering it (!). That's a lot of 9 volts.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
...but third Saturday of the month, you can probably find one for sale in the Cal Poly parking lot! :-)
I looked at building a computer once, but it was above me, i would love to try this sh*t
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
We had to build a microprocessor, and write a simple operating system. You could program the computer in assembly, so given enough time we probably could have had basic on there as well.
I'm running down to Radio Shack for some wire-wrap right now!
That's a pretty broad definition of "useful". Knowing how to seat the magic bits, and how to divine which one has lost its magic, is far more useful than being able to build one's own CPU.
... on where you want to put your effort. No human can possibly know everything so we tend to specialize in things.
I know the basics behind building a CPU and I know how one works (I built one on paper in school many, many moons ago), but that's it. I prefer to spend time writing software and just programming stuff. Most of the time you do not need to know how a CPU works to be a programmer. Exceptions might be if you're doing embedded work, but the higher level programming requires less low-level knowledge and that's a good thing. You can focus on solving high-level problems rather than diddling around in NAND-gate-land.
He appears to have made his own webserver as well.
My
Limekiller
Oh wait, that is already five, and you asked for four. Maybe the Commodore doesn't count. Oh course, there are WinCE devices that became laptops as well...
Seriously, what are the four according to you? I am interested now.
Lasers Controlled Games!
IBID.
Sigs are bad for your health.
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top *of the* slide.
Think about it - the next lines don't make sense if he's already slidden - "Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride, Till I get to the bottom and I see you again." And besides, the lyrics to all the songs were on the back of the poster that came with the album (vinyl).
For those who don't know, these are part of the lyrics from the Beatles' song, Helter Skelter (which, I've heard, was U.K. slang for a playground slide).
...to Yoda-fish
Tubes? If you can come up with the plans and parts list for a tube based computer and then post it as "build your own EMP proof computer!" You'd go into the hall of fame for sure!
heck, I'm tempted to ask slashdot right now (I'll probably be rejected but you might have a shot.)
The whiny teenagers with computers their parents bought hang out in the Games section.
... is plain stupid.
It will be really cool if he, for example, created
Basic or Tcl or Java or Prolog hardware interpreter machine, or tagged architecture machine, or parallel computer. Or a computer with no registers at all (all commands work with memory).
It will be at least a little innovative...
that's funny cus whoever modded that offtopic obviously falls under the 11rd category
They will never get old! Not until beowulf clusters no longer exist, anyways. Then, it's old news, and thus, old.
hey!
Back in my day I had to write games in BASIC, on a 4.7Mhz computer with no hard disk and 128K of RAM. And I was grateful
;^) There was talk of modifying beepers for two way wireless communication.
Heh. Back in high school we all had TI-83's. You can do a lot with 28k and BASIC given enough mind-numbing general classes and a spot near the back of the room. We got to the point where we could program those things blindfolded (those keypads were a tad awkward) One friend reimplemented Oregon Trail. Another did a 3D plotter and a window manager frontend with app launching. Course, when the rare teacher took to resetting calculators before exams, all that fine work was lost.
I know that my story pales in comparison to most of the audience here, but that's how it was for me.
Workshop In Computer Construction - From Nand to Tetris
Forbidden You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers. :)
--
" Tubes? If you can come up with the plans and parts list for a tube based computer and then post it as "build your own EMP proof computer!" You'd go into the hall of fame for sure!
/. crew killing themselves on the high voltages (ask anyone who's worked on a tube amp). I'm just imagining the power meter making out like a ufo when I switch it on. :)
heck, I'm tempted to ask slashdot right now (I'll probably be rejected but you might have a shot.)"
Well it's getting near the 10 post limit, and the beds calling, but I could proably do it. The hard part is the tubes (maybe pixie)[1]. I'd be more worried about the
[1] I should say very hard. Just ask the FAA. And you thought NASA had it bad.
Can somebody post the pages if u have downloaded the link is gone thx
Ah Yeah! Great site.
The "Meta" is interesting, but will there be any advantages over Freenet? Though merging the two together may work out nicely. The thing is, I don't see how they'll stop ISPs (like AT&T BB--soon to be comcast) from blocking services. Won't they eventually just block all connections except outgoing to their mail servers and web proxies? Do you see WiFi as a potential local solution?
Imagine a Beowulf clus..... oh, never mind
that it is a rather moved [disturbed] idea
to build itself its own CCU [to construct my own CPU]
but perhaps give it of people which I can animate by this website to something similar [but perhaps this website will induce people to do something similar]
or which even my CCU to copy to want [or even desire to copy my CPU].
I will make everything available on this side gradually, which is needed for the reproduction of the CCU.[I will gradually make available all the information necessary for the construction of this CPU.]
All I want to know is how this relates to THE MATRIX RELOADED.
Site's down. Here is the Babelfish translation of slashdot effect:
Forbidden
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
No, I don't have a ton of access - not even by mission.
All Rights Reversed.
Undoubtedly, interpreter
These are just two of the magnificent words of the English language.
Feel free to use them any time
And that's discounting passive components and assuming that you can squeeze the wiring between the gaps.
For comparison, using the same assumptions, a P4 would require a square board measuring ~22.5m on each edge [504(m^2) area].
I'll leave it to someone else to work out the power requirements, and how reliable it would be with all those heat-generating components packed so closely together.
--
People don't get their hands dirty anymore. It's a lost art- children (admittedly before my time) use to fiddle with electronics, take things apart, build something new. There was a lot to discover, a lot of flexibility. Components could be coupled together in very different ways. Now, when a kid tells me he's built a PC, big whoop- he stuck some boards into slots, plugged some cables in. What's missing, and may stunt future growth- are products that can be disassembled easily- and rebuilt or modified... I once built a record player out of cardboard, wax and and an old motor. It palyed good for about five minutes, but then went up in flames. I learnt a lot from that- but if I start to build something based on a current digital tech it's impossible- my stereo is one chipboard- what can kids do with that? The future of science depends on us being able to make new areas exciting and visible to kids- quantum mechanics and splitting atoms remains impossible for 5 year olds. Congraulations to this guy- he's done a good job- but please, think of the children...!
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency (Eugene McCarthy)
11th.
moron.
Middle-endian dates.
Non-military people can't seem to understand a 24H-clock (Yes, I've had Americans ask me what 17.00 is in "normal" time).
Non-metric system (hey, even the *English* have figured out it's not so great).
Ah well, at least you drive on the right side of the road...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are 10 types of people;
00 The ones that understand trinary
01 those who don't
02 people who mistake it for binary.
10 And people who repeat the joke without realising there should be four options.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Atually no there shouldn't... 10 types of people means we either start from 01 or stop counting at 02..
The off-by-one bug strikes again..
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
It's simply a convention. Of the six possible ways to arrange month, day, and year, three are in widespread use: mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy, and yy/mm/dd (yy might be yyyy as well).
The US standard makes sense in some ways: mm/dd is what you commonly write, with an implicit year (though this used to be more true in the past). This is in the normal sense-making big-endian format (rather than the crazy European little-endian format). Then when you want to denote the year explicitly you tack it into the end. This is admittedly a bad place for it -- it really should go on the front, but it makes sense in a way, since it's being tacked on as an annotation. I.e. "It's 12/24. In 2003." That makes sense, whereas "The year is 2003. It's 12/24." doesn't really.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I swear I heard a story once about IBM's R&D looking into building a trinary computer.
Then again I might have been drunk...
If you thought whirring fans were bad, wait until you hear how loud this one is.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
DIY electronics seems to be dying and i can't really understand why. I recently made some research for a own project and i came to the conclusion that it nowadays it is easier to design some decent hardware than ever before.
No more fiddling with a bunch of TTL/CMOS logic chips. You can get a programmable CPLD with 800 logic gates for 99 us cents (e.g. from xilinx). Free design software (also said to be running under linux with wine) is available too. 800 gates is enough for some really nice projects. In circuit programmable.
Or try a cheap controller. For example AVR RISC. They are fast, they are powerful, they can be programmed with a gcc-variant. Just take the chips a oscillator and go. Programmable with a cheap parport interface. Oh, and the best is the price: Starting at US$2.
Soldering it on a experimental board? Maybe, but what about designing a pcb? Take EAGLE as layout software (freeware version for non commercial use up to 1/2 eurocard, enough for some decent design). Get the pcb fabricated for example in hungary (US$21 for a whole eurocard, all inclusive).
So i hope we will see a return of home development. It is getting even cheaper and more powerful. I just read an announcement for a new FPGA with 1 million (!) gates which target price is under US$20. This is enough to even construct your own CPU. Wouldn't that be fun and educative?
So see the possibilities and go out and design something. And probably make the design available under some open license. The time has never been better before.
I think you mean toffee-nosed..
sorry to be a pedant...
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.
Maybe he did his own CPU circuit (KEWL) or his own VGA card (EVEN KEWLER), but how did he build memory? Did he build flipflops or tubes? Isn't that *very* expensive (arsenicum, germanium, gallium) and error-prone??? I can't imagine him using off-the-shelf dimms, dram or sram (build-your-own-super-computer)
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
Unfortunately, Google's cache is empty, and it hasn't made it onto the wayback machine either...
Anybody grab a copy?
Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, ybt bss abj. Tb bhgfvqr. Syl n xvgr.
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
which roughly translates to: all your base are belong to slashdot
Apart from the fact that it's impossible to build anything even approximating what intel and amd put out (unless you own your very own fab, which I somehow think unlikely), there's also that CPU design has evolved in the last two decades. Most people can easily understand how a Z80 or 8088 works, but try explaining the design of a p4 or athlon to someone, and you'll get a lot of blank stares.
I know I flunked computer design the first time I took it as part of my CS course. I simply didn't understand all the intricate details of pipelining.
Can people like me still learn to speak languages fluently?
Yes. Immersion is the most effective way and maybe the most stressfull way too (not necessarily a bad thing). I met an Aussie in the Guangxi provence in China. He spoke Chinese fluently. Turns out he started doing work in China in the mid-80's in the Gobi desert... not too many English speakers there. He basically had to learn Chinese in order to feed himself. He said that was a great motivator.
More practical is a style of language study called the Pimsleur Method. There is no reading involved, no written studies at all. Paul Pimsleur's premise is that you can learn a new language the same way you learned your first, by hearing, speaking and repetition. I bought the Mandarin Chinese 30 lesson set (for about US $350) and its worked pretty well for me. You can pick up sample packs at many local book/music stores that contain the first 6 or 8 lessons for a reasonable price that can be applied to the whole course purchase if it works for you.
Even so, you must use your new language or it will never set and/or you'll lose it.
No! Smarch!
Voice-Over (Marge) "It was the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month... we were meeting to discuss the misprint in the school calendars"
Homer (Grumbling): "...Lousy smarch weather..."
Perhaps we all need to build our own stuff to stay free when Palladium (or whatever it's called these days) are built into every chip made by all major chip vendors.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
oh and besides, it'd be 15 feet tall and weigh 2 and a half tons... and thats the portable.
Verboten
Sie haben nicht Erlaubnis/ mycpu-g.htm zugÃnglich zu machen auf diesem Bediener.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80
What site?
Build one out of old relays. *Then* I'll be impressed.
--- Ban humanity.
I think that I'd want the lan party to come to the Big Box.
(Cold cathodes?! HAH!)
I mean a Big Box vacuum tube computer could be a great educational tool! all the parts are human servicable size and it brings Das Blinken Lights back to the world of computing.
And there's also the danger-cool factor that if the Cooling System Fails There's 60 seconds before self destruct.
Run the cooling system and computer off diesel generators which are also emp proof and be the envy of your neighbours.
Also, I don't think ANYBODY has implemented an Ethernet card in valves before.
Cmon! You could even prevent people frying themselves by posting "You must have somebody with EE degree majoring in high voltage on your team before attempting these plans" in big friendly letters all over the plans.
It'll be fun.
We were trying to prove the possiblity of new course for the collage
Ah, how I miss the days of good ol' collage- that random gathering of a mish-mash of mishapen minds that somehow made a nice pretty pattern...
Also taught alot about low and high logic.
High logic- is that like when I try to argue with my friend about basic economics after he's thoroughly wasted?
Some parts are edible.
(hopefully Euell get it)
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.
:)
How I love Babelfish.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
http://www.fpgacpu.org/links.html
http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp_fpga.html
Michael Sokolov is rumored to be working on a FPGA VAX-inspired CPU with intent to fab eventually.
All I want to know is how this relates to THE MATRIX RELOADED.
If some german guy can do it, so can some computers!!
I know for a fact that's coded into at least one company's vending machine displays.
It's also an easter egg in a DTMF controlled system I built not too long ago...
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was, I think, the first computer built completely of chips - and all the chips were the same, 3 input NOR gates (http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/ic/medium/002.html ).
i on .htm
I'd like to see the complete design and build one of those! Where does one buy ferrite cores nowadays?
http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/introduct
Ecce potestas casei!
Power requirements would be slightly elevated. Let's assume double the power consumption, what is that around 400W max? So for the P4 we would be using 400W in a 504 square meter area. Thats about 0.8W/m^2. If there are 250 x 333 transistors in that area, or about 83K transistors, each would use about 10uW per device. Even if the "device" started using 400KW the power dissipation per device would be a measly 10mW. No, the transistors would not be generating a great deal of heat.
Now consider how many clock cycles would be used going from corner to corner. Let's make it a 1G processor for the fun of it. The square is about 31m diagonally. At the speed of light that can be crossed in about 100ns. A single clock cycle at 1G is 1ns, so synchronization would get very interesting.
Sig is on vacation
Making people speak with an accent to make them another nationality is a very American thing.
Sorry long post (rant), but this is one of my my pet peeve....
Have you seen the movie "Chocolate" ? Actors talking english with a french accent, so that we know that they are in France !! Well I spent a lot of time in France, and people there tend to speak french, not english with a french accent !!
Have you seen "Home Alone" ? The funniest movie ever. I don't mean for the plot, but when they get to the airport in France, nobody in the whole airport speaks french with a french accent, all the supposed french people have a heavy american accent, that is so funny !! Especially that it is obvious that the airport part of the movie was made in France (you can recognize CDG, which I think would be quite difficult to re-construct in a studio)... I believe there are 55 million or so people who speak french with a fench accent in France, you'd think it'd be easier to hire a couple of them, rather than fly somebody in to speak with an american accent !!
the English number system (what we SAY) is based on value. you don't day eleventh when the VALUE is only 3. you say third.
mormon.
Well, the problem with the solution you propose is that it would require being in the proximity of actual French people, which has certain olfactory drawbacks.
Shame on Google.
of open source hardware? .. it's got a long way to go :)
-judging another only defines yourself
I _did_ build a computer once, but I have no great personal merit - it was a kit. A Sinclair Spectrum clone, back in the early 90's. I still got to solder the Z80 CPU, the memory chips, all of the glue logic, the I/O chips etc. Worked like a charm, but the CPU kept overheating and after a while I'd get weird errors. This was, you see, before the age of heatsinks and fans for computer chips (the 'modern' CPU at the time was Intel's 386). I eventually got another CPU and replaced the first one, and the problem with overheating went away. Must have been a bad part.
I think I still have that machine somewhere, although I haven't seen it or used it for well over 5 years.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
When presented with this particular course project. For unawares, the instuction does:
if ((*addr1 - *addr2) < 0)
goto addr3;
No opcode is needed, just 3 words. The professor was pretty mad, but the "CPU" did run all the sample programs. Multiplication subroutine is left as an excersize to the reader.
Now the cool thing is that you shouldn't need a factory, FPGA or anything like that to make this CPU, just a soldering iron and some transistors. Anything like that out there?
I think we managed to Slashdot his site or something, but the funny part was that I used that Babelfish link and got this:
:-)
Forbidden
You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpug.htm on this servers.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at kuschel.citybug.de Port 80
Hmm, I'll interpret that like that there's a ton of access on his server.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
i do believe i've read somewhere that we have the ability to build a base 10 computer... but i don't know how that would be done. would everything transferred as light and stored as something weird?
I've noticed far more Europeans leaving out important linking words, especially when writing dates. Americans will usually write "September 5th," whereas it's not at all uncommon to see Europeans write "5 September," as in "I'd like to schedule a meeting for 5 September if no one has any conflicts," something you'd never see an American write.
As for "write me," that's standard English, and there are many other verbs used similarly. You can say "sing me a song," or "give me your wallet," or "help me," and such usage dates back at least to the previous century.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I've had a few cunning plans over the years, but 90% of the time, the electronics vendors won't even return an email. It's damn hard to DIY when you can't even get the basic components.
Corporations view us as "consumers" not as customers, and certainly not as people - so you better get used to no more DIY techy-stuff. Unless your idea of DIY is a run of 5000, that is.
00 is not a value. that's like saying "there are zero types of people, people" when that really means there is 1 type of people. that's 4 options for "3 types of people"
It's already worth HALF what it was yesterday, like anything else made from silicon. Except boob jobs. What is the fasination of american women with big oddly-shaped boobs?
Yeah, but anyway. "people who think they know binary, but don't" is a subset of "people who don't know binary"
Perhaps there's 100 kinds of people;
00 - people who don't know binary, and know it.
01 - people who think they know binary, but actually don't.
10 - people who think they don't know binary, but actually do..
11 - people who do know binary.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Build Your Own Green Rosetta ! Ho... So sad i've got this one on the late.... i think i should get a +5 funny :)
"Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." - Nietzsche
Actually, it _IS_ pretty sad, when you think about it. Phenolic resin (bakelite) is easy enough for one person to make. Solder is relatively simple to make from refined lead/tin. Even from ore it's not especially difficult. Electricity is the easiest of all. Just put up a windmill, or build a heliostat.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
if it won't even run a linux 2.2 console, why bother?
Repeal the DMCA!
wrong, Intel donated a Pentium 2 fab to the University of Illinois. Hypothetically speaking, you could make your own pentium class 32-bit processor, but the issue is that it would require many man-years of design work unless you copied other designs. I'ts not worth the effort when you could just go work for intel and be doing something productivive.
Repeal the DMCA!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I came into this late, so not many /.'ers will see this.
Here is a site I've been watching for a couple of months. This guy is building his own mini-computer using TTL chips.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
He built his own PC from actuall PCB boards, circuit chips, layed is own circuits down, and even manufactured his own CPU. It looks like he even created his own OS and some simple graphics to show off his hardware. I assume this guy has no social life whatsoever and is still a virgin.
But, why the hell would he want to build this when it is easier to get the parts and build it himself. But this argument would be comparable to being a PC modder. Why would you build and/or construct your own mods when you can buy them pre-made. I prefer to build my own mods with my dremel and a little imagination and ingenuity.