neat find

From: emanuel stiebler <emu_at_ecubics.com>
Date: Tue Apr 14 19:22:42 1998

Hi tony,
you know where to get the amd assembler for this stuff ?

cheers,
emanuel

----------
> From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
> To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp_at_u.washington.edu>
> Subject: Re: neat find
> Date: Tuesday, April 14, 1998 3:14 PM
>
> >
> > today at goodwill I found a Advance Micro Device AM2900 Evaluation &
> > Learning Kit in the it's box (very nice design on it) with one
worksheet.
> > the unit was only $5.
>
> The comment 'you lucky beggar' springs to mind !.
>
>
> The AMD 2900 series of chips were essentially a build-it-yourself CPU.
> The main ones were :
>
> The 2901 - a 4 bit ALU + registers. You could cascade these to give you
as
> many bits as you wanted (in multiples of 4). There was also a fast carry
> generator, equivalent to the 74182. Was that the 2902?
>
> The 2903 was an enchanced 2901 AFAIK. I never used it.
>
> Then there were the 2909 and 2911 4-bit microcode sequencers. You
> cascaded those as well to access whatever size control store you wanted.
> Add a bit of jump logic, and write the microcode to control your CPU.
>
> For simpler designes there was the 2910 12 bit sequencer which couldn't
> easily be extended (*). That would seqeunce a 4K control store, and had
> some of the jump control logic built-in.
>
> I've done a bit with these chips, and was reading the data books earlier
> today, actually. Great pity they're no longer made...
>
> (*) PERQ systems used a 2910 as the sequencer on the 4K PERQ CPU board.
> The 16K CPU board also used a 2910 with a '2 bit kludge' to provide the
> extra address lines. The pun on '2 bit' is intentional, and will be
> understood by anybody who's ever written PERQ microcode...
>
> >
> >
>
> -tony
Received on Tue Apr 14 1998 - 19:22:42 BST