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."
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.
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.