3 ms·

Clever! Were you inspired by the very early machines that used serial processing to save on the number of tubes?

• rst 6y ago
  There were a few bit-serial economy designs going into the transistor era -- the latest I'm aware of is the PDP-8/S (S for Serial) from 1967. If you want to build a really cheap machine and transistors are $1 each (closer to $8 current dollars after inflation), this is how you do it. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/how-much-did-early-transistors-cost https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/devices/h...
  • userbinator 6y ago
    The CDP1802 also uses a serial ALU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802
• kens 6y ago
  A historical note. The earliest bit-serial processors (EDVAC, EDSAC) were motivated by their serial memory. They stored data as ultrasonic pulses sent through tubes of mercury. Since you get the bits out of memory serially, it is easiest to do arithmetic serially too. The Datapoint 2200 desktop computer (whose architecture became the Intel 8008) used a serial processor for similar reasons. Except this time the processor was built from TTL chips instead of tubes and the memory was Intel shift-register memory chips. (Shift register memory could be built cheaper than RAM memory, but with the disadvantage that you had to wait for the bit you wanted to circulate through the shift register.)
• howerj 6y ago
  Not really, I was only inspired by their existence and nothing else, in retrospect it might have been nice to copy the instruction set of something like a PDP8-S and get software for one of them running on it, but I like having something that is my own.