3 ms·
Why reverse engineer anything ? Just look up the logic diagram in your copy of The TTL Data Book.
by rjsw 10y ago
Why reverse engineer anything ?
Just look up the logic diagram in your copy of The TTL Data Book.
- Someone 10y agoAre all of them standard ones? If so, you're 100% right. Also, I just saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11930327, which states: "All the Alto schematics are available at Al Kossow's Bitsavers [1]. If you want to understand how it works, start with the hardware manual [2]" That must make this one of the easiest pieces of hardware to keep running, at least for the digital parts (monitor and hard disk are more of a problem, I understand)
- gumby 10y agoI don't know of any nonstandard 7400 series parts (not sure what that would mean) but the low end ones (all the SSI and MSI) must have several suppliers even today.
- jecel 10y agoThe first Altos used early dynamic RAM chips which required some really oddball chips to talk to TTL. I imagine that both the memories and the interface chips are probably very hard to find these days. But this particular Alto is five years newer and probably doesn't have these problems.