Talk Of Building A Computer...

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Thu Nov 20 10:52:51 1997

<If you're going to try this, I'd suggest starting with something simple
<like an adder or a flip flop, or a register. You'd get an idea of what
<would be involved with a simple processor. But I think it would end up
<being pretty expensive.

I have some partial designs for transistor hardware. A flipflop design
used for the TX2 required 10 transistors, 22 resistors, 8 capacitors, two
inductors and three operating voltages. A register 8 bits wide would require
8 of these plus gating logic possibly doubling the number of components
needed. You can now see why early machines were register sparse.

FYI I have an article for a TIC-TAC-TOE computer using tubes and Neon lamps
and it required some nine 2d21 thyratron tubes and 190 neon lamps(serve as
gate logic mostly and two per box for display). This is a very limited
fixed logic machine and it required a lot.

Allison
Received on Thu Nov 20 1997 - 10:52:51 GMT