Via IEEE Spectrum [ http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/diy-as-an-extreme-sport ] at [ http://homebrewcpu.com/ ]. Amazing piece of work, now duplicated, as final year projects by students at Universiti Teknologi Petronas [ http://www.aidilj.com/homemadecpu/ ].
Sigh, I miss the 'good old days'...};-) ===== DIY as an Extreme Sport Want to test your hacker prowess? Try to beat this scratch-built Web server By DAVID SCHNEIDER / OCTOBER 2010 [...] Bill Buzbee, of Half Moon Bay, Calif., has built himself a Web server entirely from scratch. Scratch is, of course, a relative term. No, he didn't draw the copper into wires or slice the silicon into wafers. But he did construct his home-built CPU, called Magic-1, by meticulously wire-wrapping together some two hundred 74-series TTL chips. They reside on five printed-circuit boards, which are housed in a cabinet whose front panel is replete with dozens of LEDs and paddle switches. It thus has, as he intended, the distinctive look of the mini- and microcomputers of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Buzbee claims that it sports the performance of an Intel 8086 (a close cousin of the 8088, the CPU found in the original IBM PC) making it a decade or so ahead of its nonchronological time. It's a DIY masterpiece. But Buzbee is self-deprecating in advertising his creation: On his Web site, at http://homebrewcpu.com, which is served up, of course, by Magic-1, he says, "I'm continually amazed that the damn thing runs at all, much less runs as well as it does." [...] ===== -- Soh Kam Yung my Google Reader Shared links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16851815156817689753) my Google Reader Shared SFAS links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/16851815156817689753/label/sfas) _______________________________________________ LUGS Mailing list - [email protected] List FAQ: http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq Info page: http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet To unsubscribe send an empty email to: [email protected]
