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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."
This is the ultimate nerd project... The only way it could be more of a do-it-yourself project would be building it with all analog parts. I'm very impressed. The guy appears to have been really meticulous. Everything appears to be pretty well documented... I've only gone through about 1/4 of the stuff he has available. It's a lot of material. I definitely wouldn't have the patience to do a project like this...
The guy went and built his own cpu from scratch, then ported his own o/s to it.
Really, just don't get more hardcore than that....
I salute him!
This is my sig.
Somehow I don't think the goal of this project was to build a processor to compete with commercially available processors. A small hint might be the fact that there isn't likely a huge market for a processor pushing 5lbs.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
All that to get a fraction of the performance of, say, a $10 embedded CPU that can already run Linux. Nice.
I guess you don't program computers, since you'll never be as good as, say, Donald Knuth, so you may as well give up. You don't do any sports, since you'll never by Olympic standard. No music for you either, since you're not up to the standard of Nigel Kennedy. I'm sure you have no hobbies, since someone else could do it better too. If fact, you may as well sit in a hole your entire life since whatever you do, someone will probably do it better. Come to think of it, there's probably someone out there better at sitting in a hole than you.
Now, please hand in your geek card at the door as you leave.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you're just gonna use an FPGA, why not just design a virtual PC purely in software.
This thing is cool. Most current 'seniors' would hold a wire-wrap gun wrong and injure themselves.
It's more educational to do it with MSI TTL and wire-wrap. You learn something about power distribution/filtering, race conditions, fan-in and fan-out, etc. All of the analog things that you need to know in the real world.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I bet you'd also tell the team who built a replica Wright flyer a few years back that they were wasting their time, and would be better off building a Zodiac sport plane kit.
Some times people do/make things they could easily buy because they want to, to learn, to feel connected to those who came before them and did it on thier own, or to just have something they built with their own hands.
Please if you can't understand that at least don't mock others who do~!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
If you want to exploit clever loopholes in things, go into science. As a fellow engineer I completely understand why your prof took off marks for your trick - it's bad engineering practice. You were in school to train to be a professional engineer, and with it comes certain responsibilities and mindsets. Sure, this one project was for a college course, and nobody's ever going to die from it, but in your school projects you are expected to show the same due care and diligence that would otherwise be expected of you in the workplace.
A better course of action would be to document the loophole and suggest in your documentation that, in certain, very controlled circumstances, this can be used to optimize performance (but it's a PLC, seriously, performance?). As engineers we're expected to do things by the book, following accepted standards, and if we deviate from it we are to document it fully with gigantic red underlines or whatever. This is the type of procedure that keeps planes in the sky and cars on the road.