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
- 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 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
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.
Something sayes his website will not be up for long...
not so much serving up pages anymore, is 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
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
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."
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.
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
1MHZ is a million cycles a second. Kilohertz is thousands.
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
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.
Back then, we just had a Slash - AND WE LOVED IT.
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."
Dennis Kuschel from Germany already did a similar project years ago. check his german page http://mycpu.dr.ag/ or his english page http://mycpu-en.dr.ag/ Dennis also wrote a custom OS with network stack and a c64-compatible basic interpreter for his homebrew-computer.
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)
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
yeash, stupid idiot, doesn't he know you can just go and BUY a computer with a tcp/ip stack !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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!
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!
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.
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
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.
DRM-free, beeyotch!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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))
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.
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
in chips of other manufacturers.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
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...
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!!!
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
This guy's a masochist.
He said that he WANTED to do one using TTLs. He didn't WANT to use an FPGA (but said that Magic-2, the successor, may use one).
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.
Programming gates in an FPGA hardly qualifies as "building" something. You've created something, but it doesn't even come close to wrapping wires and thinking about how to position components.
I like to use stuff to accomplish things though, not just to be thrown out once you're done building it.
What in the hell makes you think he's going to throw this out?!
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.
Why should a person with a strong EE background have serious knowledge of HTML? Do physicists know everything about chemistry?
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.
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
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.
[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
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.
Ah, I see you've been deceived by the "little-endian" heresy. As all right-thinking people know, both bits and bytes are numbered from the "big end" first. [In truth, I got used to big-endian numbering when doing lots of work on HP's PA-RISC architecture, which used big-endian bit numbering. So, when doing my own CPU I decided to make it big-endian as well.] As far as the blue wire, I started out trying to use different colors, but found that only a few kinds of wire would work reasonably well in my cut-strip-wrap gun. And, it only came in blue. I did make an exception for clocked signals where I could and used red wire (but I only had a limited amount of it).
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.
Strong EE background? Where did you hear that? His site states that he has a BS in Journalism and an MS in Computer Science. This project really has no serious EE involved. 95% of the design is in Computer Architechure, Logic Design and compiler software. I can't imagine how long it took to debug that thing.
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.
And 6.004 students at MIT used to build similar computers, although they didn't do nearly as much design work. They did, however, span the full gamut of code from the very lowest level (called "nanocode" in the Maybe Machine) to OS-level functions. In one term. Including writing direct emulation code for a number of radically different architectures.
Similarily, 6.170 students would build reasonably large projects out of TTL circuitry in three weeks. The one I worked on didn't have quite 2000 TTL chips, but it had perhaps 200, including custom designed hardware, instruction set, assembler, and so forth. My team built a polyphonic music synthesizer, the sort of thing that now you can get as a little keychain do-dad for $1.29 at the checkout counter that's made of a single custom IC, a piezoelectric speaker and chicklet buttons for keys.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
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.
you simply run out of upstream bandwidth.
The same thing that happens when you try to run a warez ftp on your $20/mo cheapo 'net connection.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Yes, I just put it back online. Actually, Magic-1 did just fine during the Slashdot storm - it was my home DSL line that got creamed (enough that I had to block access). As far as serving pages, Magic-1's 3Mhz clock isn't the primary bottleneck, it's the 38400 baud SLIP line that feeding it. My big regret right now is that I never got around to upgrading the packet statistics counter to 32 bits. It's 16 bits right now, and it looks like it's going to be rolling over pretty frequently.
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!
The key was simulation. I wrote two complete simulators for it during design, and had the LCC C compiler running long before the first wire was wrapped. Also, while still in simulation, I wrote and passed a complete architectural validation test suite (several hundred individual tests).
Now that I think about it though, there is a better answer. I've been actively working on this project for about 4 years. It's taken me 4 years to debug.
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.