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A Replica of the First 4004 Calculator
mcpublic writes "For the 37th anniversary of Intel's 4004, the world's first off-the-shelf, customer-programmable microprocessor, vintage computer enthusiast Bill Kotaska has successfully built a replica of Busicom's historic 141-PF printing calculator using vintage Intel chips. Decades before the ubiquitous 'Intel inside' sticker, Japanese calculator maker Busicom introduced the first product ever built around an Intel microprocessor. Bill's homebrew replica includes a rare Shinshu Seiki Model-102 drum printer and runs firmware extracted from the original Busicom ROMs. Schematics and photos of his re-creation are available at the unofficial 4004 web site, along with Tim McNerney's new PIC-based emulator of the Model-102 printer. The site includes the Busicom 'source code,' 4004 details, interactive simulators, and other goodies for students, engineers, and computer historians." We discussed the 36th 4004 anniversary project here last year.
... you would have just got a "4004 Not Found" error.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This criminal mind has misappropriated proprietary copyrighted code by the Japanese company Busicom. If he can't wait until 70 years from the death of the author, i.e. until year 2100 or so, jail is too good for him. I hope they throw him to a bunch of radioactive mutated lawyers.
You mean I shouldn't have thrown mine out in the trash?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Looks complicated. I would have a very difficult time coming up with such a polished work.
Surely you mean 55378008. Or 5318008, for that matter.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
yes.. yes.... but does it run Linux?
I'm afraid he's going to have a lot of trouble finding printer cartridges for that thing.
The link posted is to the main site 4004 site; the actual project article is here: http://www.4004.com/busicom-replica.html
no comment
Yeah... but since it prints, it wouldn't look as good.
Now, if you could wire up an alphanumeric printer to detect when you write stuff like that, decode it, and print it forwards...
-- J.P.
Funny how TFA talks about wire wrap boards giving projects a "vintage" look. I saw, as recently as 2004, an Augat wire-wrap board being used as a part of a PhD student's research work. This isn't so bad in itself, except it had about 20 ECL logic chips, carrying 80 MHz signals. There were runt pulses and false triggering all over the place. I replaced it with a single Xilinx Coolrunner II.
We willon have been already did!
We've got to get Back... to the Future!
Back in the late-60's and early-70's, when the Busicom 141-PF calculator software was written, United States copyright law was very different, you needed to explicitly mark a work with a copyright symbol, and register it with the U.S. Copyright Office. Nowadays everything is automatically protected by copyright law. Back then it was not. There was no copyright on the Busicom binaries, so this code is free-and-clear. The re-created "source code" was written without access to the original Busicom source code. In this sense it was done using techniques similar to a traditional "clean room".
After looking at the photos, I recognized the printer as being exactly like one I got as surplus around 1977. I adapted it to work with my Dad's Commodore PET through the parallel port. It had a spinning drum covered in raised numbers and symbols, and solenoid hammers for each column. By firing the hammers at the right time as the drum spun, I could make it print any number. I wonder what ever happened to it...
He used a 2716 eprom in the re-creation. That was a part NOT available in the time of the 4004. He should have used a 1702 eprom. These parts are not THAT rare, though he would have needed 8 of them to replace a single 2716.
Aren't those chips well past their Use by date.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."