Slashdot Mirror
Hand-made Web Server, Built From 200 TTL Chips
ps writes "Bill Buzbee has constructed a hand-made CPU, complete with
hardware address translation, memory mapped I/O, and DMA, out of 200
74-series TTL chips wired together with thousands of individually wrapped
wires. By using a port of Adam Dunkels' uIP TCP/IP stack to the Magic-1, it
currently serves up live web pages
at an amazing speed of 3 MHz. See the website for photos and
schematics."
And as part of its stress-testing procedure, its been slashdotted!
This just goes to show the kind of amazing innovation that can still come out of a garage project. One guy working on his own can sometimes come up with ideas that the big guys like Intel etc are just too slow to be able to jump on. They're all fiddling around trying to get their buggy Verilog tools to work, while this guy just goes and wire wraps it in a few evenings. Bravo! I'll bet it takes the big semiconductor companies at least a year to catch up with this.
He posted his 3 Mhz server on slashdot.. i guess that by now that fine wire-mess is a melted wire-mess...
A computer running at 3mhz is about to get slashdotted? Good Luck....
Post a link to a 3 MHz webserver on Slashdot? BRILLIANT!
Hmmm.
Sublimating chubby black beetles in three... two... one...
-- "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut." - Einstein
3 MHz? That poor server was /.ed before the article was even posted :P
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
- Already slow even before hitting the front page: Check
- Millions of bored geeks have just dragged themselves into work: Check
Yep, there is no chance this will get slashdotted, but in case it does, I think there is a mirror working here.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I'm sure it will withstand being linked to on Slashdot!
...
I can almost hear the explosion and the ensuring fire, and the screaming, and the water...
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
P.S. Cool project Bill.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
That was cruel.
hmm....homebrewed webserver...serves at a majestic 3MHz...so let's all Slashdot it real quick! However, if the next Slashdot article talks about how we lit up a 3Mhz webserver on fire, I'll be satisfied.
3Mhz, this won't get slashdotted.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Something sayes his website will not be up for long...
not so much serving up pages anymore, is it?
Listen to that baby burn! Burn, baby, Burrrrnnn.....
nothing like killing a 3mhz webser with enough traffic to bring down machines 1000x it's power...
...sorry)
maybe of a beowulf cluster of those ? (couln't help it
Magic-1 Stats
* Files served: 804
* Boot time: Sunday, June 05 2005 - 08:59:01 PM
* Current time: Monday, June 06 2005 - 07:05:14 AM
* Ticks mod 64: 56
* uIP start time: Sunday, June 05 2005 - 10:18:36 PM
* Clock speed: 3.0 Mhz
* OS Version: 1.33
* Slashdotted: Monday, June 06 2005 - 07:13:14 AM
That reminds me so much of a MITS Altair (8800 or 680b, take your pick)
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
and posting a link to it on /. is just ... evil.
currently serves up live web pages at an amazing speed of 3 MHz.
not anymore! it was nice while it lasted though.
It served up live web pages at an amazing speed of 3 MHz.
it currently serves up live web pages
Not anymore it doesn't...
I still have to say I'm very impressed with what they've done. It's not something I could do. I think it goes to show how much really goes into any chip these days, how complex they really are.
Don't buy WoW Gold! Make it yourself!
THIS is the type of stories that Slashdot should be posting! Cool engineering type stuff. Enough with the "M$" slamfest and what is Apple/Sony/Nintendo doing today crap.
In the time it took Bill Buzbee to create his homebrew CPU, I perfected the artificial vagina. Coincidently, it too is constructed out of 200 74-series TTL chips wired with thousands of individually wrapped wires. Now I ask: whose time was better spent?
Letter
And cackling "3 megahertz, mwahahahaaaaaa". He pressed the submit button.
Deleted
Somebody grab a stopwatch... I think this one may set a new record for World's Fastest Slashdotting.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
I guess I managed to fetch the page before the slashdotting really took effect. Now I can't get to any of the links.
Too bad, I really wanted to telnet into the machine to play Adventure.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
...it currently serves up live web pages...
It previously served up live web pages...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
I can't figure out who is more humor impaired--you, or the person that modded your post "Insightful."
This would have been news in 1981.
The first ad on the google adsense box was from Micrsoft. Clicking on it gave me the good feeling of knowing I took a few cents from Microsoft and gave it to Google and Slashdot.
Laboriously painting a beautiful portrait with traditional medieval pigments -- something that would impress even da Vinci -- and then wondering aloud if it is fireproof enough to withstand a blast from a 21-century flamethrower.
While the webserver is currently unresponsive, I am left to wonder why. If it can serve webpages at a rate of 3MHz, it is very fast. As we all know, 1 Hz is one per second, 1MHz is one thousand per second. The article stated that the home-built webserver was serving pages at 3MHz, or at a rate of three thousand pages per second. That is very impressive. Now, if the webserver was only processing instructions at a rate of three thousand per second, then it'd be totally screwed.
Yep, there is no chance this will get slashdotted, but in case it does, I think there is a mirror working here.
...".)
Nope - the mirror got slashdotted, too. (Or otherwise is "not working here" - which I presume is the import of an error message saying "unable to locate
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wow that got /.'d before anyone even tried to access the site.
As I write this, the vast majority of the 38 comments are about /.'ing the machine, blah blah blah.
I, for one, think it's a neat project, and bow to Buzbee's superior geekdom.
Seriously. Likely we're going to /. his homebrew 48.8KBPS ISP LONG before we hit his CPU. :0
You saw it here first.
-BK
Chemical Blog
(and I'd like to disturb the silence by saying that the lameness filter/posting timer is on the blink, telling me that I could not post this comment because it was 4, 11 and 13 minutes since I had succesfully posted a comment and Slashdot enforces a minimum 2-minute wait between posting comments... wtf?)
Exactly. The cpu won't even get hot. All that'll happen is that the network stack will get annihilated, the kernel will go tits-up and the server will simply crash.
;)
Now, the fundie mods, they'll set some things of fire.
It's unfortunate he chose not to implement the "500 Server Error" in his design. Shows lack of fore-sight.
Wire wrap is usualy 30awg wire
30 awg wire is usually good to 2A of current.
I feel sad for the molten slag that represents thousands of hours of work. Poor thing.
-Adam
i think its pretty damn cool despite what some say about its speed.. i surely don't see you putting together a CPU of any sort.. its all about being a hobbyist.. thats how desktop computers came around to begin with.. i praise this guy, and hope he continues his passion of doing lots of work, for such a little pay off.. 3mhz indeed, but lots of fun, and something he did all by himself..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
ps writes "Bill Buzbee has constructed a hand-made CPU, complete with hardware address translation, memory mapped I/O, and DMA, out of 200 74-series TTL chips wired together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. By using a port of Adam Dunkels' uIP TCP/IP stack to the Magic-1, it currently serves up live web pages at an amazing speed of 3 MHz. See the website for photos and schematics."
Creating your own CPU can be a fun learning experience but has this person never heard of a FPGA?
It is basically the same thing (you can create your own CPU) except much easier to work with since it would require much less parts.
I wonder how much power all those chips use?
No way I'll stick any part of my anatomy into that!
TTL uses power continuously, not just during switching states. So the load on the server should have no relation to the power usage.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
If he can produce this with raw ttl gates, it can be produced with an fpga. Voila, a one chip web server which should run a lot faster than 3 MHz. (Of course, I haven't rtfa for obvious reasons.)
This is actually neat and useful.
... a lot slower than I remembered.
Poor little ball of wires... never knew what hit it... -John.
Self Serving Sig: Hosting Comparison
Now this is what geekness is all about. I remember back in the 80's while in school I designed a digital clock built entirely from TTL devices. Sure I could of just used a off the shelf clock chip, but that would be too easy.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Magic-1 is a homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn't use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but rather has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but there's also a full ANSI C compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), and a rudimentary homebrew operating system. You can even telnet into Magic-1 and play Original Adventure.
This web site has served as the development repository for the project, and contains lots of pictures documenting the construction, as well as full documentation and diaries stretching back to the project's beginning in 2001. You can also find a few videos of Magic-1 running, including the first time it worked.
Start here, and then check out the Overview and Photo Gallery. To dig deeper, browse through Technical Info, Construction - and if you're really interested, you can even download Magic-1's full schematics.
Magic
In the summer of 1980 I celebrated my freshly minted B.S. in Journalism by blowing most of the cash I collected in graduation gifts on a TRS-80 Model 1 computer. Sitting on the floor of my apartment I fired it up, typed in the sample BASIC program and then "RUN".
"BILL", I responded.
Wow! I was blown away. This was just a machine, but I could interact with it using language that we both understood. As a Liberal Arts graduate with next to no technical background, I found this completely astonishing. Over the next year, I continued to play with my TRS-80 Model 1 while working as a journalist on a small-town Kansas newspaper. I decided that I really wanted to learn more about how computers worked, so I went back to college and picked up a M.S. in Computer Science.
Now, more than 20 years later, I find myself with an urge to touch that magic again by building my own computer from scratch. By "scratch", I mean designing my own instruction set, wire-wrapping a CPU out of a pile of 74 series TTL devices and writing (or porting) my own assembler, compiler, linker, text editor and operating system.
I'm calling this computer the "Magic-1", or M-1 for short. It's a one-address, microprogrammed machine with one-byte opcodes. It features 8/16-bit data operations, functioning on an 8-bit wide data bus with 16-bit addresses (mapped via 2K-byte pages into a 22-bit physical address space). Code and data address spaces can be shared or disjoint, giving each process up to 128K bytes of addressing. User and supervisor modes exist, along with hardware address translation, memory-mapped IO, and support for DMA and externally-generated interrupts. As far as components go, it is built entirely out of 74LS and 74F-series TTL devices plus modern SRAM and old bi-polar PROMs for the microcode store. I designed it to run at 4 Mhz, but missed a couple of critical paths - so ended up at 3 Mhz. Goals
OK, so I understand wanting to do your own CPU, buy why on earth are you doing it this way? I mean, why TTL - why not FPGA? And really, 16-bit virtual addresses in a 22-bit physical address space! What's the deal with that?
I guess any project should start off with some notion what of what you're trying to achieve. My high-level project goals are: bullet
Touch the magic. By this I mean to gain a deeper understanding of how computers work, and specifically computers similar to those of the late 70's and early 80's that first fired my interest. For this reason, the Z80 loomed large in my mind throughout the design process, and running with an 8-bit data bus and 16-bit addresses just seemed right. Although I'm largely trying to use parts that would have been current in that time, I'm not shooting for historical accuracy. My choice of
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
Since TFA says
He made his own CPU with TTLs ... used a port of Adam Dunkels' uIP TCP/IP stack... and made the homepage http://www.homebrewcpu.com/ with MS FRONTPAGE!!!
Doh!
you broke his toy. shame on you all.
> i guess that by now that fine wire-mess is a melted
:)
Seriously (no, I mean it) could someone describe exactly what happens to a server when it is slashdotted?
Anyone? The more detail the merrier.
I'm writing up a PO to replace our web cluster with these. How soon can you provide 150 units?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I hope he included DRM, so that the chip will be considered part of microsoft's trusted computer program stuff, i'd hate to buy one and not have longhorn run on it properly when it comes out
Blinky lights~Real Computer
10 years ago I worked in a mainframe shop that had upgraded from the 4381 to a 9121. Neither system had much "eye candy". That meant that the client didn't have much to show off in the "big window" of the data center when tours/investors were guided thru.
Unless Tex was working.(and thankfully he almost always there). He was the client's rep that ordered paper by the semi for us & was able to bend Standard Register to his will with a mere phone call(one semi load of paper a year will usually do that, we did multiples)
Tex would lead the tour to the window and happily point to the elderly IBM network controller(box was actually blue on the sides, model forgotten) with all its blinking status leds and tell em "there is the computer".
They'd make "pretty lights" noises and continue along, Tex would grin from ear to ear & we'd have to wait till they left before we could run outta air laughing.
Tex dreaded the times anyone talked about network upgrades.
but waste of money
you could buy microcontroller and ethernet ready chipset for it for less than the cost of 200 ttls
and you'd get much better performance with that rig
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Right now the coral cache of the Magic-1 is operating. But only the front page.
Amazing!
Jeremy Baumgartner
it used to serve up live web pages at an amazing speed of 3 MHz
you're the chicklet!
Come on guys, this is 3,000,000hz! That's like, wow.
Modern computers come with like 2.4 or something. This is wAY WAY faster, no way will we slashdot it.
back in the 70's I had to build controllers for video switching equipment with TTL gates, but I'm just wondering what this 4 year+ project proves in 21 century. Heck, I haven't even wirewrapped a board in 15 years; there's better ways of doing EVERYTHING now.
Not sure if it fast enough but..
Burn Baby, Burn!!
I guess the smell of burning silicon is kinda overwhelming now?
/. is good for you.
So there.
All he has to do now is build 1000 more machines and one hell of a load blancer. :0
This is a prime case where the submitter should have : 1) warned the site's owner, 2) made arrangements for a mirror or coral cache or bittorrent whatever. Because you KNOW this bitch was gonna go down like a three-year-old trying to stop a stampeding herd of elephants.
And the alledged "management" of slashdot should have at least warned the poor sap before unleashing this upon his little corner of the web.
That said, this sounds uber-l33t, and I'm planning to check it out once the smoking rubble is cleared away.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Easiest. Slashdotting. Ever.
The real sad thing is that from a traceroute, it looks like he's hosting the site from his personal DSL connection. So, he probably can't even contact anyone for help or to even complain.
Hope he doesn't need to use the Internet any time soon.
RIP, hand-made CPU...
DRM-free, beeyotch!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hey Steve, I know that IBM's Power PC chip has turned out to be a big disappointment. You're looking to cash in on CPU savings similar to what Dell is experiencing with Intel that IBM hasn't been able to provide. The G5 is as close to going into powerbooks as it was a few years ago. My suggestion to you is to consider using the Magic-1 CPU. Assembly is a snap! Sure, if you were to have it assembled in the US it would cost a pretty penny, but why not give our friends in Bangalore a chance? Sure, I understand that speed is a concern and that this CPU is only 3MHz. Well, dual core CPU's are starting to come out and quad core CPU's are on the horizon. You've always been an innovator. Why not have a 1000 core CPU? Can you imagine the press you'd get? All the hipsters would have to pause their iPods for a breif second in recognition. Hold the phone, you want more? How about this. This new system can be setup to launch different applications randomly. Starting up the applications you want is so passe. People love surprises. LIFE IS RANDOM.
...Why???
When our interns or junior staff start complaining about mundane work, I show them pictures of wire-wrapping and tell them that used to be what the interns and junior staff did when I was learning the ropes. That ususally shuts them up for a while...
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Hold the Apple keynote, and show it to Steve.
How can I squeeze this box onto my socket 462?
Points missed: pretty much all of them.
RTFA, he states that he knows he can use FPGA's etc. but doesn't want to. He WANTS the nostalgia value of wiring everything from bare basics and, short of wiring millions of transistors together, has done it. It was a personal project that was never supposed to have any value except that he can say "I made that".
Personally, I'd love to have the money to start on something like this myself. It's something to show the grandchildren... this is how we used to do it and this is one that **I** made.
It never hurts to forget where we've come from. You might as well ask why we're bothering to keep BBC Micros, ZX Spectrum's, Commodore's, PDP's in museums. This wasn't a "practical" project, it was a personal one.
Also, I think it's a good thing to propogate the knowledge that is needed to build something manually from bare components rather than rely on a manufacturer of FPGA's, etc. to still be making the same components in another 50 years, the software to program them still be around etc.
I've often pondered on what would happen if we had, say, some sort of nuclear war that put all the current methods of manufacture out of action. At the moment, everything is built on having a certain amount of technology available to build upon to fabricate the "latest" technology.
When those layers are removed, you will have to go back to basics. This is why I was also against the scrapping of coastguard listening stations that would listen out for ordinary AM-radio morse code SOS signals. It's the lowest common demoninator that can be easily fabricated from the lowest-level components.
We shouldn't forget where we've come from in case we ever had a need to get back from there!
Is this an Amish version of a web server or something? I know the Amish insist on doing things the hard way, such as plowing a field with a horse. Why would a person choose to build a system today using old tech such as this? Must be some religious thing or perhaps a new Amish Sect? Compish? Or is it simply Stupish? ;)
Sure, a 3 MHz TTL device isn't going to compete with anything comtemporary, particularly a commercial microprocessor.
True, nobody is going to buy one due to the labor cost to build it.
But can anyone think that it was built to set the world on fire? Has nobody but me ever built something simply for the love of doing it, or the knowledge gained from figuring out how to do so? There's more to building something (whether it be from a kit or personal design) than the usefulness of the end result.
NetBSD is expected to boot on it by the end of the week.
Did you hear that sound of 200 chips and thousands of wires instantly exploding at an amazing speed of 3 MHz? Anyone's got a mirror?
taht is teh coolest thing i have evar seen!! bill is a leet haxor supreem.
I built my motherborad out of GINGERBREAD!
And the computer itself out of wheat bread.
Top that
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
imo its the editors job to do checking like that not the submitter if every submitter did it then sites would get overrun with notifications that never lead anywhere
:(
unfortunately it seems the guy used absoloute links inside his site so network mirror only got the first page
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Flamebait.
Like the same flames on the webserver.
Notice how the old timers agree with me.
FUCK YOU whoever modded thsi flamebait.
Go back to Java programming 101. Some of us have real computer work to do.
in chips of other manufacturers.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
[meta content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0" name="GENERATOR"]
[meta content="FrontPage.Editor.Document" name="ProgId"]
Megakudos for the hardware, but dayum!
I'm not calling a hoax yet, but 3MHz seems awfully fast for wire-wrap. Do any of the old salts out there know what the limiting frequency would be for a wire-wrapped board?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Cache of the site.
But it might be slashdotted too.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
So sad to know that less than 50 miles away from me this poor little server faithfully chugged along until with a wimper and a sigh it gave up.
*points to his own server*
Hear that, MIKE? If you don't keep on the straight and narrow, you could be next...
"I'd have a 10-20 chips sitting on the garage roof" Wheee the good old bad old days - you should have stacked them on top of a kitchen fluerescent tube. It would take even longer to erase, but they would at least stay clean.
Oh well, what the hell...
"It's something to show the grandchildren"
I just don't know why the grandkids never visit!
"what would happen if we had, say, some sort of nuclear war"
I guarantee that I won't be worried about building web servers.
So, if a guy wanted to build a more "modern" homebrew CPU, what options are there? Are there any decent CAD tools that don't cost a thousand million dollars? And once a layout is done, is there anywhere you can get just one single chip made for a reasonable price?
Mike, if you read this you'll know it's you. Keep taking the medicine, huh?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/f404b5f548a3eda61 ab8ff48feb88d0a/index.html
/. doesn't need to check everything, but when the site specifically says it's running on a 3MHz box at home...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
That is EXTREMELY cool. I thought of doing one on a Xylinx, but...
Me (Blog)
Very true. You also have to remember a lot of our current technology is due to our population. If you think how many industries and people were involved in creating that computer on your desk, it really is mind boggling. Even if you know how to build a computer and all the equipment needed to produce the components, without the population it's useless. For a start who'd get the oil and refine it and then finally turn it into plastic, even the first steps require a lot of people.
Geez - I thought we had actual geeks around here. The only thing I'm amazed about is that this seems to be noteworthy. Or are the majority of people just that hardware ignorant?
In other news, major techno geek builds web server out of vacuum tubes, relays, and the speedometer from a '58 Edsel.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Using firefox and multiple tabs (as in 2 maybe 3) you too can know personally the power of the effect, as you yourself bring a web server server to it's knees.
--
I AM MIGHTY!!!
I'm married and I get it twice a day, byatch. Say hi to Rosie Palms for me.
This homebrew CPU might not impress us end-users, but this guy KNOWS how a CPU works. Have you guys wondered how modern-day CPU's are designed? You just see the chip. Ta-da.
But who deals with the processor pipeline? The cache? etc? As much as we consider ourselves "hax0rs", "da l337 of da l337", who in here KNOWS how CPU's work, to the point of being able to design one?
This Rocks, I wish I could do this.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
Another point is that the FPGAs, CPUs and stuff we use today didn't just appear out of nowhere. Somebody designed them. Somebody had to know how this stuff works at a hardware gate level.
I've played with FPGAs myself, but have also designed and wire-wrapped the occasional board. Nothing as big as a whole computer, though.
...laura who remembers computers that were whole shelves of boards covered with TTL
Looks like it could run Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. I'll take 2!
- Just because we CAN do a thing, does not mean we SHOULD do that thing.
What were the /. editors thinking linking to a 3MHz(!!) webserver on the front page??
Slashdot editors thinking? Oh wait...nevermind.
Nothing to see here. move along.
Hope he doesn't need to use the Internet any time soon.
"911, can we help you?"
"Help! My homebrew computer is on fire! I live at..."
[error: connection reset by peer]
Ooops....
It conjures up the two basic feelings central to all such articles:
1. Wow! what a cool project. This guy has some SERIOUS geek cred. Imagine hand wiring all of that, etc. and,
2. Wow! This guy really needs to get a life. You know, meet a few chicks, go bowling... something.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Actually as part of our senior project, we had to build a CPU using TTL gates. And that was for the EE. The ME was an complete manufacturing line.
200 TTL chips for the CPU, $60
Wirewrap boards to put the chips on, $20
Wirewrap wire to hook everything up, $20
turning on your webserver, only to be slashdotted - priceless!
I think his wife and three kids might not appreciate that comment!
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Did the editor really need to keep in the link to the actual web server? Like a 3Mhz server made out of hundreds of small chips is really going to withstand a link on slashdot! Why even include it?
The regular site is down too, so screw all your "RTFA" guys, we can't unless we use a google cache or mirrordot.
-Sumit
I'm pretty sure you must have meant the opposite of that...
All aside, this project is awesome - I'm not a hardware guy, so I'm pretty much blown away by the level of detail required. Good job Bill!
Please ignore any obvious problems in this post.
Even though that joke was fairly predictable, it isn't fair that the poster should suffer a net karma loss for it despite the +5 funny total score. Shame on whoever gave that post an overrated moderation, may remorse be yours forever.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
The most incredible wirewrap project I ever saw was CMU's original Warp computer, a 10 CPU array computer, all wirewrapped and running at 10 MHz. Each cell had 255 chips and drew 136 watts peak. The whole array delivered 100 MFLOPS peak and about 30 MFLOPS on real problems. Apparently the price/performance was quite good by the standards of the day (1986).
_ 1987_1/annaratone_m_1987_1.pdf
The boards themselves were an incredibly dense thicket of wire wrap. You could barely see the board for the layers and layers of wiring. I looked for a photo on the web but couldn't find one. Here's a paper describing the project:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub3/annaratone_m
Martin
Eventually this is how you will get a DRM free computer, if you dont know how to deal with FPGA's that is...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Personally, I'd love to have the money to start on something like this myself.
you know that there are a lot of companies like TI, Analog Devices, and National Semiconductor where you can request free (as in beer) samples. That can get you started and then maybe you can fill in the gaps later.
TTLs are cheap to get, most of them free for small projects.
I tend to agree totally, as I sit here with an 8031 SBC I built 15 years go sitting on my desk.. It don't do anything, other then serve as a reminder of the past..
However, I think its safe to say that in the future there will still be other FPGA companies out there, so as long as you don't try to hoard chips you will be ok.
Also, don't forget the amazing things you can do with a simple PROM chip.. Any discreet logic can be emulated ( at decent speeds ) with a large enough PROM. The 'poormans' FPGA. Its how we did it in the 'old days'.
Though I don't think ill care much about it all if we get hit with a nuclear war, as finding food and water will be more important then balancing my checkbook..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
now if it had handeled slashdot at only 3mhz.. we wouldhave needed to test it with botnet.. but it is dead so Nothing to see here ... please move along
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Well you see, M1 to M4 were not entirely successful. This one is. M5 is ready to take control of your ship.
When I was attending tech school in Western NY in the late 70s there was a nearby computer store run out of a guys basement. He also had an '8080' that he built out of TTL in a rack mount that ran at 10 Mhz. Probably the fastest implementation of the architecture at that time !
Come now, you should know that /. editors don't give a rat's ass about little things like bandwidth. They've got network pipes thicker than Paul Bunyon's sausage, racks of servers, and a readership in the thousands; I think they get a kick out of DoSing the little sites. Sort of like frying ants with a magnifying glass.
In all seriousness, people have suggested that they at least mirror small sites at the initial posting and they have steadfastly refused. Hell, a link to a google cache would be better than nothing.
Humorless sig goes here.
i'm not gonna post how this ttl cpu has melted into little bits of plastic and metal. Instead, I'm imagining a Beowulf cluster of these cpus. And that's making me laugh even harder.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Very cool project. Might have killed for a front panel like that back when I was working on Z80 projects -- especially before logic analyzers became affordable.
For a homebrew project, that's a serious amount of wirewrap. At least he used RAM/EPROM/UART chips, instead of a _lot_ more flip-flops and other gates.
Two things struck me as strange though. Why was the front panel done LSB to MSB instead of the more common (certainly more readable) MSB to LSB? Also, why wrap virtually everything in the same blue wire? I always tried to do power/ground/signal (at least) in different colors -- may have made his missing memory ground wire easier to find.
You guys are such dicks.
I agree completely with everything you said except this last bit: if technology disappears, chances are high that it will disapear 'further' than TTL logic. As someone else pointed out we would also have other worries.
did anyone get a glimpse of how much the rig cost? i am the first to admit the cool factor, but geeze, that must have been alot of time and money if every in it wasfrom scratch.
Personally, I'd love to have the money to start on something like this myself.
In quantity the chips are about a quarter each and a spool of wire is only slightly more. You can buy enough stuff to "get started" for about $10.
Personally, I wish I had the dedication to finish something like this.
[goddamn default options]
Headline: "M$ turns iron into gold"
Comment: "Ha ha ha hope the alchemist wasn't running without SP2!"
Reply: "Ha ha ha wonder if this will be GPL'd?"
Reply: "Ha ha ha... not to interrupt the joke but I'm sure you meant copylefted... hahaha" [twenty post tangent-thread about the pros and cons of each]
Headline: "Apple invents new, sub $1000 Macintosh"
Comment: "Let's see, the PCs have been sub-$1000 since, what, 2002?"
Reply: "Dumbass, you mean 2003. And anyway Apple has far more repubility" [
twenty posts of the usual]
Anything else, either the joke is "hahahaha RIAA", "hahahahaha MPAA", "hahahahahaha George Akbar Lucas", or, rarely, "hahahahahaha Cowboy Neal".
And no, I'm not a M$ supporter. Just the first two topics that came into my fatigued brain at this hour.
Id love to try somthing like this, but be really great if there was an HDL to ttl 7400 series synthesis tool. Anyone know of software that would take either verilog or VHDL and rather than mapping it to an FPGA or somethings, generates circuit made out of 7400 series chips?
Why not use an FPGA instead? You could have the same design flexibility with a lot less wire wrapping.
Vote for Pedro
... is this cosidered interesting?
and
Why...is this considered "news"?
----- Open Source = More Secure (mmmmkay)
Well, maybe not the webserver part...
When I was an EE undergrad at Ohio in the 1970's, I had heard that a fellow in the accelerator lab across the way had built a TTL-based computer which ran at 20MHz (I *think*). I tried Googling it, but I didn't find any references. So, I never actually *saw* it and it's a nearly thirty year ago memory. Take it with whatever sized salt you'd like.
Milalwi
You finally made it to the front page of /.
About time too.
I've been following this guy's progress for more than a year now - sometime before he had the final schematics finished, and well before he actually started building anything.
This is the uber-geekiest project ever and I'm quite dismayed by the number of posts that are saying, effectively "So what? He could've bought a better computer off the shelf!".
Bah! To all you naysayers. This man deserves a Hacker-of-the-year award for seeing this through.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Out of gross curiosity is /.ing a DOS?????
Seriously, that's pretty much what they were, just piles of TTL logic chips and strung-on-wire graphite beads for memory, all on pizza-box-size boards that slipped into a big chassis. You needed at least three boards, one for the CPU, one for memory, and one for I/O. The first minicomputer I worked with was a Data General Nova 1200. 1200 as in 1200 nanoseconds PER INSTRUCTION. That's a whopping 833 KHz. And a stunning 8 kilobytes of memory. It was amazing what we got that thing to do, though.
You can tell you're getting old when people start reproducing the obsolete crap you're happy as hell to have left behind.
Okay, as an antisocial loser YOU may have no use for information appliances in such a scenario, but I'll go ahead and take the survival advantage that they provide me.
http://www.homebrewcpu.com.nyud.net:8090/
http://64.142.4.132.nyud.net:8090/
check for a cache before you post that!
Having said that, ok it was MEAN!
Hemos, you're a tactless fucker. You read the blurb, you know it's only a 3MHz machine, you KNOW that millions of slashgeeks worldwide will click that link and bring that guy's machine to a halt. Don't say it's stress testing, don't say anything like that.
Have a little common sense (and maybe some respect) and don't link stuff like this on the front page. Link a mirror. Hemos, you're pretty nerdy I bet, I'm sure you can use wget to mirror somebody's site and find a place to host it for a while. I mean, if it's a tiny page on a 3mhz computer, it shouldn't take much to mirror it and be nice to the fellow and his project. Or even a coral cache link would be fine, so we don't break this guy's handmade computer.
Have you ever hand-made something as an imitation of something else which is bigger/better/more powerful than your imitation, and then had somebody come along and use your imitation just like it's the real thing, and break it? Any adult who constructs model aircraft and has children should know this one by heart. Hemos is the annoying child who comes into our garage and plays with our model aircraft like they're toys and eventually breaks them because he doesn't understand that they aren't toys. He's actually a lot worse than that, because he's inviting over a million of his friends to come into our garage and play with our model aircraft like they're toys, ensuring only that they'll get broken faster and those with the mental capacity to enjoy the models as something other than toys will be left with nothing.
I mean, really. I am not trying to be a troll here at all. Does anybody else see what Hemos did as totally tactless?
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I'm used to seeing such kit accessorized with twenty years of dust bunnies and dead roaches.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Oh come on! If I put together something like this I would WANT it to get slashdotted! Years from now you could pull it down from a shelf.. or point at it in the corner and say .. I made a CPU and it got slashdotted!
The ISP may not be too happy though : )
for shame
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
If he has a dynamic IP, it's simply a matter of making a new request. He just has to make sure that his dynamic DNS service doesn't update until the /. effect dies down. :)
Chances are most of the tech centers where engineers live will be gone - and with them the information.
Chances are the only surviving, and inhabitable (for the next 10,000 years or so) regions will be places like South America, Africa, northern and central Australia. You have to boot-strap the world from there.
There will be batteries and appliances for years afterwards, but the batteries will die out. Maybe some solar powered calculators will survive, but the infrastructure and "start with nothing" knowledge will probably be non-existant, and the priorities will be food, water and basic survival.
Over time, new societies will develop, new kingdoms formed and a new world order. With it will come organization and industrialization. It will take hundreds of years.
Still... you've got to laugh.
Amazing things can be done with a few measly logic gates and a few machine code instructions. Heck, you think a webserver made of 200 TTL chips is crazy? Check this out. About halfway down the page is a description of the R-741 computer, a minicomputer built in the early '70's to run robotic machinery. I doubt it even contains half as many as 200 TTL chips, and running at 4 MHz on a custom instruction set, this thing's operating system, coming in at a whopping 21k, runs all the functions of digital and analog I/O for robotic machinery--under a complete language interpreter! And it's faster at some functions than many modern computers, given that its electronics, instruction set, and software were all designed so tightly that not a single chip or wire was used unnecessarily, and not a single clock cycle was wasted. Today's general purpose machines, with their zillions of logic gates and gigabytes of memory, are weighed down by layers upon layers of stuff.
It is truly refreshing (and a priviledge, I suppose) to work with this R-741 machine. And it's quite refreshing to see someone build a webserver in a similar style. We need more of this type of ingenuity, and less mountains of bloated code that work too hard to do things that are basically very simple.
As of Tue Jun 7 02:31:03 UTC 2005
Files served: 758
Boot time: Sunday, June 05 2005 - 08:59:01 PM
Current time: Monday, June 06 2005 - 06:21:43 PM
Ticks mod 64: 10
uIP start time: Monday, June 06 2005 - 06:04:02 PM
Clock speed: 3.0 Mhz
OS Version: 1.33
God.. that was the best laugh I've had in weeks.
Yes, the server is going to go down heavily. But this is slashdot, not... hmm... I can't think of any other news site forum like slashdot but with less of a punch..
Ah, you found me!
What the hell? do you know anything about the level of technology produced in South America? let me give you an example, Nuclear Reactors exported to places like Australia.
google cache link
Does it go on forever?
BTW, the Cinematronics arcade hardware used a similar approach of building a CPU out of TTL logic. In that case it was able to run at 5MHZ, which was faster than microprocessors at the time (the Apple II, for instance, only used a 1MHZ 6502).
It's amazing to me how few components it takes to create a fully functional CPU.