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homebrew 8008 project

I'm a perfectionist too, but ever since December 2004 the projector has been on loan. I never thought it would be here this long. ;)

That's what I've been thinking about with the RGB display. Right now the 8x8 blocks are $240 in quantities of 120. I am waiting for a quote at the 1000-2000 level.

Even if I decided it was worth it, each display has to be updated close to 70Hz*256 shades = about 18kHz. This requires a microcontroller for small blocks of the display like you said. Things start to get expensive!

I would probably settle for a monochrome display. I would REALLY like to build one with the 5x7s, but they seem to cost too much. :( An 80x20 serial terminal made out of LEDs the size of a 50" TV would be cool. :)

My current display is the size of a couch, as you can see! :)

I will try to sell a kit when I am done. The display out of individual LEDs with ALL the PCBs (drivers and LED panels) as well as all the driver chips will be about $1200. Think anyone would bite? ;)
 
carlsson said:
The 8086 has 29,000 transistors. The i386DX has 275,000 transistors. The Pentium MMX has 3.1 million transistors. The Pentium 4 as of year 2000 had 42 million transistors.

Assume you need at least one square centimeter per real transistor, at least if you wire them together manually. The 8086 would take almost 3 m² (31 sq. ft). The Pentium 4 would take 4200 m², or roughly one acre. If you construct the CPU with more space, it will be larger.
Click to expand...

Something that is not only possible, but has been done, is to recreate the 4004 in discrete transistors. Very cool project: http://www.4004.com/

Art
 
8008

8008

Hi All;
I have built a small TTL Cpu, using state timing and not microcoded logic... As I have wantd to build an 8080 from TTL logic, and only recently found the 4004 35th Anniversary site and Schematics... I know what it would take based on what I have already done... But maybe for help in understanding, I might try building the 4004 from 7400 TTL logic, as a first step... I know that the 4004 is not compatible with the 8080, and as a second step then doing an 8008, before doing the 8080.. and I have a sim 4 -42 Intel board and prom board and Parallel board and an old Prolog M900 that usues the 4004. I have also build an 8008 microcumputer based on the Titus Mark 8, all wire wrapped, and it works... So It can be done... You have to keep at it and regularly do something on the project, before you forget what you have done.. When I first strated my simple Cpu, I started it , put it down , waited for a couple of months and had to start all over, tearing out what I had done, But when I worked on it on a regular basis, I got it done. and It also worked, after a couple of fixes... not understanding how something worked.... So a few of us are nuts, but I would like to do this, can't tell you why, but, just I want to...
THANK YOU Marty
 
Ok, this goes back a few years in this thread, but being a thread of historical sorts, I hope that is ok.

I was talking to a colleague the other day, and told him one of those "aha!" moments for me was reading a Byte magazine article that described how to build a functional computer from a bunch of TTL stuff you could get mail order. For me, it was the point where the CPU was no longer a black box, and was just logic.

When I left for college, I dumped my stack of Bytes in the, well, dumpster. Foolish mistake, probably. But Googling around, I think the article might have been about the "EGO" (Allison, still out there?). All I remember was that it used a TTL RAM, might have had a four-bit word, or used a four-bit instruction, and had a "store negative" as the only store instruction in order to economize on the number of instructions.

Ring any bells? Flip any bits? Anyone know where I can find old Byte articles, other than the dumpster?

-Fin
 
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