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."
It served up live web pages at an amazing speed of 3 MHz.
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.
I can't figure out who is more humor impaired--you, or the person that modded your post "Insightful."
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*
So what was the intent anyway?
You left sarcasm off your list.
KFG
US Population in 2000:
296,296,953
The bulk of the US runs in 4 time zones.
I figure if 5% of people are geeks, there's at least 2-3 million geeks in any given timezone even at loose standards. (Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Pacific Island territories excluded)
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.
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!
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.
Sure it isn't that the internet's just gotten cheaper to operate? I mean, used to be a penny a gig, now it's less than half that. And building a web server that can stand slashdotting of the old proportions is easier now than it used to be, that's for sure.
My little site.
/. 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.
You are 100% missing the point of this exercise. It's more art than technology. It isn't about speed, it's about fun, and beauty, and designing something yourself, without the need for the latest-and-greatest. It's much easier to buy a fish at the store than catch one yourself, but I don't see fishermen stopping that any time soon.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Why should a person with a strong EE background have serious knowledge of HTML? Do physicists know everything about chemistry?
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
Way to miss the point! Since his intent was to delve into the lowest levels of the CPU logic (all of which is sealed up in a glob of epoxy in your suggestion), I'd say your solution has a performance of 0.
As for being a waste of money, that depends on the value he places on what he has learned (including insight you have to experiance rather than just read for) vs. the cost in time and materials for the project.