NANDputer lives!



http://blog.kevtris.org/?p=62

Thanks for the post Chuck, but we need a photo... here's the ALU board - one of several plugged into a backplane:



Cheers
Ed

That's amazing. It's so useless, and yet so useful, useful because of all that is learned in the process of making it. It reminds me of BMOW and of Dieter's processor made of discrete transistors. As he pust it, "This is art." And yes, there's a reason people take the time to paint a picture when it would be so much easier to just photograph the scene. (I tried a little painting in high school, but then got super interested in photography.)

Thanks for the link, Chuckt. I got a big grin out of this project. It reminds me of some (half-) joking comments shared years ago with some computer buddies of mine. We were pursuing the same line of though: namely, a computer built with low-integration components. Rather than NAND gates, we proposed to use nothing but Open Collector inverters (such as 7405). In our discussions we laughingly referred to this most basic of elements as the "BUT Gate."

We had a lot of fun, and thought our approach (it was just talk) represented a delightfully low level of of integration -- VSSI, you might say, rather than VLSI! But Dieter put us all to shame by using even lower integration... and actually building a working unit!

Jeff
http://LaughtonElectroncs.com