DIY CPU Demo'd Running Minix 313
DeviceGuru writes "Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus."
Truly news for nerds!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Family Analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
Coolest, dude ... ever... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, just don't get more hardcore than that....
I salute him!
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess you don't program computers, since you'll never be as good as, say, Donald Knuth, so you may as well give up. You don't do any sports, since you'll never by Olympic standard. No music for you either, since you're not up to the standard of Nigel Kennedy. I'm sure you have no hobbies, since someone else could do it better too. If fact, you may as well sit in a hole your entire life since whatever you do, someone will probably do it better. Come to think of it, there's probably someone out there better at sitting in a hole than you.
Now, please hand in your geek card at the door as you leave.
Re:yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
This thing is cool. Most current 'seniors' would hold a wire-wrap gun wrong and injure themselves.
To evade whitelists (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doomsday paranoia (Score:0, Insightful)
Retard.
Re:Doomsday paranoia (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:To evade whitelists (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doomsday paranoia (Score:2, Insightful)
But then again, if you cracked open all the electronics sitting in the garages of your average town you might come across a small mountain of TTL chips.
Maybe.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some times people do/make things they could easily buy because they want to, to learn, to feel connected to those who came before them and did it on thier own, or to just have something they built with their own hands.
Please if you can't understand that at least don't mock others who do~!
Mod parent up (Score:2, Insightful)
However, something has to be said about wirewrap in educational settings: It's a lot easier to make out the connections of a macroscopic object that you wrap yourself, than staring at a colorful diagram of what your usual FPGA route plotter comes up with.
Re:Whats amazing is if he did it just for fun (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to exploit clever loopholes in things, go into science. As a fellow engineer I completely understand why your prof took off marks for your trick - it's bad engineering practice. You were in school to train to be a professional engineer, and with it comes certain responsibilities and mindsets. Sure, this one project was for a college course, and nobody's ever going to die from it, but in your school projects you are expected to show the same due care and diligence that would otherwise be expected of you in the workplace.
A better course of action would be to document the loophole and suggest in your documentation that, in certain, very controlled circumstances, this can be used to optimize performance (but it's a PLC, seriously, performance?). As engineers we're expected to do things by the book, following accepted standards, and if we deviate from it we are to document it fully with gigantic red underlines or whatever. This is the type of procedure that keeps planes in the sky and cars on the road.
Re:Doomsday paranoia (Score:3, Insightful)
Joseph Henry invented the relay in 1835, ten years after William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet (in turn five years after Oersted discovered electromagnetism in 1820). So the relay was invented a couple of years before Babbage started describing his analytical engine (1837 - the simpler difference engine he described in 1822). Had the knowledge of eg Boolean logic been there, a digital computer could certainly have been built before 1850. (In fact it took until 1937, when Claude Shannon proved in his master's thesis that Boolean algebra could be implemented with relays.)
Assuming one already knew how to do it -- as with a time traveller -- all you'd need is a supply of wire (and some means to insulate it) and iron to make the relays. Chemical batteries are rather easy to make if you've got a couple of dissimilar metals, but if you can make relays you can probably also make generators. A modern day "Connecticut Yankee" could have given Arthur an electromechanical digital computer. Smelting of iron began in the BC era, and use of meteoritic iron goes way back. The ancient Egyptians certain knew how to make wire (for jewellery), so who knows how far back you could go. It's not so much a hard line as a level of increasing difficulty.
The difference (Score:2, Insightful)
"Linus has copied Minix!!!1111one" == Troll
Consider the difference between serving a cake, and throwing it into someone's face. Sorry for not using a car analogy.
Mod GP back to troll, please.