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Man Builds Giant Homemade Computer To Play Tetris (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: A man has finished building an enormous computer in the sitting room of his bungalow in Cambridge. James Newman started work on the "Megaprocessor," which is 33ft (10m) wide and 6ft (2m) high, in 2012. It does the job of a chip-sized microprocessor and Mr Newman has spent $53,000 creating it. It contains 40,000 transistors, 10,000 LED lights and it weighs around half a ton (500kg). So far, he has used it to play the classic video game Tetris. Mr Newman, a digital electronics engineer, started the project because he was learning about transistors and wanted to visualize how a microprocessor worked. The components all light up as the huge device carries out a task. Mr Newman hopes the Megaprocessor will be used as an educational tool and is planning a series of open days at his home over the summer. You can watch a video demonstration of the monstrosity here.
Kilo-for-kilo, the cheapest hobby computer money can buy!
Or has DEC been dead and buried for so long (18 years) that someone has decided to repurpose the graphic simply because they can?
*BINGO*
DEC, dead. Compaq, dead. HP, dead enough.
Let it go.
When I was somewhat younger, I was a so-called field engineer responsible for keeping some discrete element computers running.
Here's a picture of a module. This would be a single logic element such as a flip-flop, NAND gate, OR, etc.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/2...
The CPU cabinet was a huge box full of these things. The I/O controllers were in another cabinet, and the memory was in another cabinet.
The other boxes (storage, printers, card readers) had these same modules in them.
I never was main support for a CPU using those modules, but had some peripherals that had those things inside.
In more modern computers, these modules were replaced by logic cards. A PCB would have the transistors/diodes, etc to make a single element such as NAND gates, flip-flops or whatever, and these cards might have as many as 4 or even 6 logic elements on a single card. woo-eee!
I was lucky to be supporting such modern machines.
These old machines required hand-tuning such as manually synchronizing the clock signals between the near and far part of the cabinets.
The oldest machine I had to maintain was an 80 column card reader that used mechanical relays for all the logic elements. That was so long ago that the nightmares have stopped.
The LEDs are the coolest part. I've had trouble seeing the video on his site since it's downloading very slowly, but I love what I'm seeing so far.
Stuff like this reminds me of RAM scanning and memory ripping back in my Amiga days. Since the Amiga had no MMU and the video chip could address the entire range of the machine's main "chip" RAM, it was popular to fiddle with the screen display and scan through system memory. You could actually watch your computer running programs in realtime. The Amiga also used planar graphics, so you could see individual bits, rather than bytes, as pixels, allowing you to identify which memory locations were used for counters, timers, disk control logic, mouse pointer coordinates, and more. I wrote a whole bunch of programs in AMOS Basic that let me directly edit memory by drawing on the screen, bubble sort graphics, visually highlight specific memory addresses used by games, and do all kinds of cool nonsense.
I miss those days when you could read any memory address without needing signed drivers and such. I've always wondered why memory visualization has totally disappeared. It might make for some interesting lessons in how modern programs actually use memory and how memory leaks happen.