Build Your Own Computer

fixit! writes "This guy built his own CPU and VGA card. The site is in German. Here is the Babelfish translation of the site."

Comments

Babelfish

[Bob McCown]

"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

[Anonymous Coward]

Drag queens?
what have you got against Monty Python? looks to me like a pretty big troll. Have you come here for an argument?

Re:Babelfish

[Snork Asaurus]

Have you come here for an argument?

Slashdot is abuse. Arguments are two doors down.

Re:Babelfish

[Snork Asaurus]

Forbidden You don't have by mission ton of ACCESS/mycpu g.htm on this servers.

Say no more, sqire, say no more.

Re:Babelfish

[epiphani]

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.

Re:Babelfish

[Oscar_Wilde]

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!!

Re:Babelfish

[dinojemr]

The google translation/cache is here

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

...A German housefire injures a computer hacker working on a weird project. Noone else was hurt.

All the news that's

[Aexia]

Last change: 16.10.2002

fit to print! That's my slashdot!

Re:All the news that's

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The tenth day of the month of Hexidecember? Is that some EU thing?

Re:All the news that's

[dirvish]

Yes, it is. They often use day/month/year instead of month/day/year

Re:All the news that's

[Sharth]

basically, everyone but us americans do the date correctly. that format is dd/mm/yy

Re:All the news that's

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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

[Captain Nitpick]

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.

Re:All the news that's

[Nefrayu]

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." ;-)

Re:All the news that's

[RevAaron]

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. :)

Re:All the news that's

[aminorex]

As anyone who reads the J2SDK javadoc should know,
the name of the thirteenth month is undecimber.
Hexadecember would be the 18th month, therefore.

Re:All the news that's

[NightRain]

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

[PurpleRabbit]

Actually, Hexidecember belongs to Novell.

Maybe.

Re:All the news that's

[conradp]

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.

Re:All the news that's

[jetmarc]

> 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!

Re:All the news that's

[evilviper]

I'll go with Dilbert's recent suggestion of "Flopruary"

Re:All the news that's

[Mwongozi]

That would be because some countries use the Day month year format and slashes. Like Australia for example. 07/06/2003

And the UK.

Babelfish has a way to go yet ...

[pantropik]

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.

Hieliche Schisse!

[EvilTwinSkippy]

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!

Re:Hieliche Schisse!

[EvilTwinSkippy]

If I see far, it is because I stand on the backs of giants.

But does it run Linux!?!?

[qwerty823]

Sorry, someone was gonna ask, so it might as well be me. :-)

Re:But does it run Linux!?!?

[rtaylor]

No, but there is a port for NetBSD being worked on ;)

Technology moves ahead.

[stph]

Holy 1970 Batman! The fiend has built his own computer! What nefarious plans he must have?

The real translation:

[Obiwan Kenobi]

This guy has too much time on his hands.

Re:The real translation:

[Vej]

guess you've never been a programmer or engineer. you don't learn on the job :)

Re:The real translation:

[msheppard]

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.

M@

Ahhh,

[dirvish]

What a wimp. He didn't even make his own monitor!

Re:Ahhh,

[bad_fx]

Ah.. I can see it now:

"And now, I vill svitch on mein home made Cathode-ray tube..."

*BOOM!*

"ARGH!! mien eyes! mein eyes!"

Re:Ahhh,

[LordLucless]

You can tell you're a German native.

Real Germans only speak in accented english, the German language itself is only a urban legend. ;p

Re:Ahhh,

[Michael Neuffer]

Actually you are not that far from the truth...

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.

NetBSD?

[SHEENmaster]

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.

Re:NetBSD?

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Neither, Linux and BSD have combined to form LSD.

That will bring totally new meaning to downloading patches.

Re:big deal

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Never heard of an FPGA?

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.

Re:Karma Whore

[UserGoogol]

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.

Re:Cool for the geek factor...

[dirvish]

I think he wrote a thesis on it.

Give the guy a break!

[PHAEDRU5]

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.

So what's so special?

[HungWeiLo]

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?

Re:big deal

[EvilTwinSkippy]

$$$ 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

For All You "Does it run Linux folks"

[jtshaw]

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:big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

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:too bad

[mrseigen]

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.

Not bad...

[curtlewis]

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.

Re:big deal

[Skim123]

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.

Re:too bad

[stefanlasiewski]

Yes, but plugging a computer chip into a slot on the motherboard isn't very educational.

Language lessons

[runlvl0]

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.

Re:Language lessons

[EvilTwinSkippy]

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."

Re:And the point?

[Skim123]

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?

go camping.

[malia8888]

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.

I can make a computer

[Ignorant Aardvark]

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 ...

Re:I can make a computer

[Nexus Seven]

I already have a beowulf cluster of those. It fits in a minivan.

Re:I can make a computer

[kurosawdust]

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

[Andre Breton]

"a computer that throws errors (and other blunt objects) constantly, coredumps at least once a day and has 33.3% downtime"

It runs Windows? I never had imagined...

Violation

[panxerox]

A clear IP violation, I mean this was done in Job's garage first you know.

I did some of this on paper

[earthforce_1]

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)

Re:big deal

[Pulzar]

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 :).

Re:big deal

[jackb_guppy]

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!

[Hacker Cracker]

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!

[kd5ujz]

Why the manual clock? Why not use a 555?

Re:Not too far out--really!

[torpor]

I want to know people like you... in case of apocalypse.

(I'll do the DOOM port...)

Re:Not too far out--really!

[Hacker Cracker]

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.

-- Shamus

This space for rent! EZ terms!

Page won't load

[jbardell]

Has he been /.'ed already? Anyone got a mirror? Cached pages? Anything?

Yep, big deal

[duck_prime]

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! ;)

Re:big deal

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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...

Good work !

[T-BoneX]

Hardware, software, documentation, all self done. wow !

Re:big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but did you design your own CPU?

DIY adders

[vrmlguy]

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.

If you liked that...

[Esion Modnar]

...man you'll rupture an internal organ here.

Yeah,,,

[Esion Modnar]

On a project like this, I always roll my own electrons, none of that store-bought stuff.

Re:Yeah,,,

[TeknoHog]

Yeah, electrons can be expensive. You might try neutrons instead, sometimes you can get them free of charge.

Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?

[aminorex]

You forgot the SparcBook. Does it have to have
been a commercial for-profit venture to qualify?

Re:big deal

[BrokenHalo]

I have 40 or so OS's on my network at home...But I know practically nothing.

But I bet you know when your power bill arrives :-)

Re:big deal

[siskbc]

Undergrads at most universities build their own CPUs. It's just a matter of coughing up the $$ to fabricate them.

CPU my ass. You couldn't design a fucking adder. And who modded this tripe informative anyway?

Aaah, the wonders of BASIC (and boredom)

[mistermund]

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)

[conradp]

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.

Re:big deal

[Fnkmaster]

I have 40 or so OS's on my network at home.

And how many women do you have at home? That's what I thought.

Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?

[HughsOnFirst]

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

Slashdotted

[Peter Lake]

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.

The More Interesting Thing is...

[Frogmanalien]

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...!

Americans and formats...

[Kjella]

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

'correctly'?

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:FIST POST

[Joyrex-J9]

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...

This are (could be?) the times...

[kju]

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:big deal

[jetmarc]

> Yes, but did you design your own CPU?

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)

Marc

Re:How many platforms are in a notebook factor?

[squiggleslash]

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)

Slashdotted translation!

[nunofgs]

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

Smarch!

[RedCard]

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..."

Other FPGA CPU projects

[nutznboltz]

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.

Re:big deal

[Pulzar]

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.

Re:Coffee-nosed???

[wideBlueSkies]

Critisism is on the second floor.

Build Your Own Green Rosetta !

[kilimangaro]

Build Your Own Green Rosetta ! Ho... So sad i've got this one on the late.... i think i should get a +5 funny :)