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

Truly news for nerds!!

[Pedrito]

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...

Coolest, dude ... ever...

[tjstork]

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!

Re:Wow.

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Wow.

[DarkOx]

All that to get a fraction of the performance of, say, a $10 embedded CPU that can already run Linux. Nice. Thank you for your post. I will never understand how even on a site targeted mostly at geeks people can't get that:

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~!