DIY CPU Demo'd Running Minix

DeviceGuru writes "Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus."

Comments

FPGAs == No Challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wirewrap? That's crazy talk. It's a senior design project to implement a CPU and such in an FPGA. Do the whole thing in a Xilinx Spartan 3A. Don't cheat and use a Virtex-4 with the PowerPC core!"

With most FPGAs any idiot, hell, even a simple Java programmer can cobble toegether a basic CPU without having to understand such fundamentals such as clocking requirements, wire delays, boolean optimization , and other fundamental skills.

I have seen the results of Java programmers trying to experiment with FPGAs. Instead of steaming mounds of code, I see steaming mounds of unnecessary gates.

Kudos to this fellow. Even designing his own boards. Using a Spartan 'Educational Kit' just doesn't cut it to become an EE nowadays if you ask me. Anyone can do that.

Wow.

[NerveGas]

All that to get a fraction of the performance of, say, a $10 embedded CPU that can already run Linux. Nice.

Re:To evade whitelists

[NerveGas]

Talk to me when that happens. In the mean time, I'm sure you'll be quite busy keeping those gubmint jack-boots from coming around your compound.