My6502 Progress

From: allisonp_at_world.std.com <(allisonp_at_world.std.com)>
Date: Thu Feb 10 14:24:32 2000

> The really innovative thing about the Elf was that it was a CMOS part (in a
> land dominated by NMOS and PMOS chips) and the timing on the externally
> driven DMA cycle was such that you could build a front panel for it that
> would use the chip's DMA capability to DMA data into memory. This made the
> front panel trivial to build (and hence the $99 price tag).

At that time the only hobbiest CMOS cpus were RCA CD1802 and the
Intersil 6100 (PDP-8 on a chip).

Around the same time sa the ELF article there was the (kilobaud) article
on the 6100 (take a byte out of this) and it's SBC (intersil 6960) that
was also very cheap. The advantage was the 6100 if the user built
interfaces that were PDP-8 compatable you could run all of the DECUS pdp-8
software. The only requred interface for a 4k system was a TTY (asr33)
and you could run FOCAL!

Allison
Received on Thu Feb 10 2000 - 14:24:32 GMT