[chbot] home brew CPU

Mark Atherton markaren1 at xtra.co.nz
Mon Nov 15 09:21:21 GMT 2010


Just spotted a comment at the bottom of the youtube posting

"Bravo! Very impressive! I have no doubt that you have read the book 
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, which as you know, tells 
the story of the Herculean effort necessary to develop and 
successfully construct such machines. If anyone out there wants to 
truly understand the significance of what Buzbee has accomplished 
here, you absolutely need to read this book. Thank you for keeping 
this art alive"

If you can spare the time, "The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy 
Kidder" is a fine read. I think that it is in the library...

BPWCS

Mark

-----------------

I was talking to one of the guys about 'real hardware' this evening, 
none of this fancy x86 stuff, I mean my first 680kHz 6800 with 256 bytes SRAM.

Anyway, the subject of the Bill Buzbee's Magic 1 came up - 
http://www.homebrewcpu.com

Shortly after moving to NZ from about 40k from where Bill lives 
(California), I found his project and helped with some of the bring 
up of the hardware via email.

So he has designed the instruction set, architecture, hardware, 
assembler and re-ported a C compiler. Not bad for a software type !

Also, just found his video on youtube - 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv2TxiwAquM - first time I have seen him.

Also never seen MakeFair before - "an annual block party for 
tinkerers" - sounds like Wed evening at Science Alive to me.

Beware programmer who carry screwdrivers.

-Mark






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