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
$$$ 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
Re:big deal
by
jackb_guppy
·
· 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.
Not too far out--really!
by
Hacker+Cracker
·
· 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:All the news that's
by
conradp
·
· 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
Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
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!
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