Developer Creates DIY 8-Bit CPU 187
MaizeMan writes "Not for the easily distracted: a Belmont software developer's hand-built CPU was featured in Wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board, Steve Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Chamberlin salvaged parts from '70s and '80s era computers, and the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection, and VGA graphical output. More details are available on the developer's blog."
Re:But does it run Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does this question keep coming up? Of course it does. It's turing-complete, so it's just a matter of writing the software. Not for the impatient users, obviously.
Re:A lenient definition of "make" (Score:4, Insightful)
That's how we used to make all hobby computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, baby...
Back before the days of the 4004, 8008, and 8080, when we built computers, we REALLY built computers.
None of this: take a pre-built-motherboard, add a pre-built-power-supply, add a pre-built graphics card...
oblig: get off my lawn
Eek! Wire wrapping! (Score:4, Insightful)
All the board level products I designed in the early 90s had to be prototyped with wire wrapping. Even if you are careful, by the time you do hundreds of connections it is almost inevitable there is some flaw. You might miscount a row of pins and attach to the wrong pin. The process of layering multiple connection to a single pin might damage a wire at the bottom. Wires might break or make a shaky connection that comes or goes.
I would not ever want to go back to that, but it did two useful things: The plodding physical process of "I'm now connecting this to that." forced a slow, comprehensive walk through of your design which can reveal design mistakes. The other is honing debugging skills of intermittent problems: "Is this a design flaw or a wire making poor contact?".
Er... WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
To have fun is not a good enough reason to do something?
I guess you would be happier if he was just another fat slob who "has fun" by watching American Idol?
This is quite possibly the most asinine comment I have seen on Slashdot in a long time.
Re:But does it run Vista? (Score:3, Insightful)
any Turing machine can emulate any other. an 8 bit CPU can do a 128 bit calculation, it just has to do it in small steps. you would probably need a lot of disk space.
for example you store on disk the input and output of every transistor in a core2duo. then you iterate through each transistor and set the output according to the input. it may take a billion clock cycles to emulate one core2duo clock cycle, but its possible.
Re:But does it run Vista? (Score:1, Insightful)
i think 2 weeks is optimistic :-)
.. so some slashdot halfwit could criticises him (Score:2, Insightful)
slashdot is really sucking hard these days.
the guy makes an off-the-cuff comment about his motivation, and some braindead moron on slashdot criticizes him for it.
HE MADE A FUCKING COMPUTER, YOU MOUTH-BREATHING DIPSHIT.
of course he had motivation! how could you sum up the motivation in just a couple of words?
what worthless piece of shit you are
Re:But does it run Vista? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:4, Insightful)
which leads to blatant disregard for anything, really sloppy ways of coding and development, zero ideology or best practice on how to truly harness and control resources efficiently.
I see lots of sloppy coding practices, but they have about nothing to do with hardware efficiency. (Think buginess and maintainability). Unless you're writing for specialized environments, the days of worrying about a few cycles of CPU, or a few kilobytes of memory are over (and good riddance).
The world has changed and the challenges have changed. It's great to design your own CPU, and I'm sure he learned an enormous amount. But to pretend that we should all be thinking like it's still 1979 is absurd.
Re:But does it run Vista? (Score:1, Insightful)
You vote republican, don't you?
Ivory tower is their favorite buzzword. Intelligence is not a negative, nor is high education. Show some respect for people who better themselves, you high school dropout.
Re:A lenient definition of "make" (Score:4, Insightful)