Re: Your worst project?
- From: "DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 25 Nov 2007 00:13:39 GMT
On 2007-11-24, Jon Elson <elson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[ ... ]
Well, I have a couple derelict projects, maybe not what you are
looking for, but ....
I tried to build a hybrid electric car. A friend donated a
massively rusted out VW bug, no floor on driver's side, you
[ ... ]
I sold the VW to a guy who needed
a good transaxle. This all happened about 1982 - 1985 or so.
I remember wrestling my 100 Lb vacuum-tube oscilloscope down the
steps to the garage to work on the switching regulator circuit.
Long saga mostly deleted.
Another insane project was building a 32-bit bit-slice computer.
The main CPU section was built on two hand-made wire-wrap boards
about 14" square. It had 16 K words of 96-bit wide control
store for the microcode.
Interesting. I remember considering making a Motorola 6800 CPU
from 2-bit bit-slice modules (for a hoped increase in speed), but never
got around to starting that project.
Lots of wire-wrapped things with 6800, 6802 and 6809 CPUs.
I actually got it running at the
blinding rate of 8 MHz for 2-register operations and 6 MHz for
3-register.
Pretty good for wire-wrapped. I wonder how much it could have
been boosted by more careful design of the routing of the signals?
I wrote an emulator in BASIC and a macro assembler
for it, and had a pretty sophisticated (for the time) download
and diagnostic system for it that ran on a Z-80 system with
S-100 bus and PC/M. (Is that the right OS for the old S-100
systems?)
Close -- CP/M. The PC term did not exist until IBM started
using it for their initial 8086-based system, IIRC.
Sort of like when I used to refer to my Altair 680b (MC6800 CPU)
as "my pet computer" before Commodore came out with the PET computer,
which led to enough confusion that I dropped the term.
I was going to implement a 32-bit microprogrammed
computer with it, based loosely on the IBM System/360, and then
have to adapt an OS to run on it. Well, I got bogged down in
microcode, and never got anywhere NEAR finishing the thing.
An impressive project, anyway.
Then, it became possible to buy a DEC MicroVAX-II CPU piece by
piece from brokers, and I never looked back! I still pull out
the huge wire-wrapped boards for visitors to marvel at.
I moved from the Altair 680b to the SWTP 6800, and then the SWTP
6809, (the last finally running with DOS-69 and OS-9 at the flick of a
switch) before I started picking up Sun workstations and servers,
starting with a Sun 2/120, and up through a current pair of Sun Blade
1000s and a Sun Fire 280R.
Enjoy,
DoN.
--
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