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In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis. It uses sixty fou
by ajp11 4y ago
In the year 1974, Practical Wireless, a UK magazine, published a design for a pong game that connects to a television, called PW Tele Tennis.
It uses sixty four NAND gates, twelve NE555 timers, two dozen diodes and some analog parts.
It's about the most basic version of the game. They later published a sound effects board and an on-screen scoring board that uses a couple of dozen more chips.
http://searle.x10host.com/TeleTennis/PWTennis.html http://searle.x10host.com/TeleTennis/PWTennis.html
- aswanson 4y agoThe 70s were everything.
- sixothree 4y agoThe 70's were when it started. You can see it in the Sears catalogs (which are available online). For most of the early 70's there's nothing interesting. Then there's Pong. Then there's an absolutely explosion.
- version_five 4y agoIn my EE degree (in year 2000), we had to implement something with external I/O as a state machine using logic gates (it was in an FPGA though, we drew the schematic). Pong is a way cooler exercise than whatever I did with a 7 segment display and a keypad. But the idea of state machines is still a big part of introductory digital logic.
- sedivy94 4y agoDid something similar for a CompE course in 2014. We made a calculator in an FPGA. Probably one of the coolest lab projects in my memory.
- version_five 4y agoWhile it has nothing to do with my current work, introductory digital systems was definitely one of my favorite classes. It was amazing to go from logic gates to adders and muxes and whatnot, to state machines, flip-flops, and useful computation. Now I work in software, and although it doesn't really come up, it's very satisfying to understand down to first principles how computers can be built up from the gate level to whatever ridiculous level of abstraction we work with on a daily basis. That's what I love about engineering generally, the ability to roughly understand what is going on around me down to some first principles.
- Yhippa 4y agoThis takes me down memory lane. Anybody remember Karnaugh maps?
- can16358p 4y agoThanks for a small flashback into digital circuit design courses. Those two-dimensional truth tables, almost forgot 'em.
- kenward 4y ago> That's what I love about engineering generally, the ability to roughly understand what is going on around me down to some first principles. This! It's very empowering and one of the things that drew me to tech/computers. Being able to understand things helped me realize the potential of what is possible with computers/computing technology. I majored in EE in undergrad and didn't really appreciate my EE education until I got older (I was more interested in software).
- suzzer99 4y agoSame here! I built a 5x7 animated display from logic gates in an electronics class as part of my degree in physics. That class and fortran were the only two classes I liked in college. I'm glad I got that experience to work with circuit gates. I feel like I have some insight into the magic box I program all day. The coolest part was our professors never told us we had to use logic (and then cycle through the pieces faster than the eye could see) to get the 5x7 led display to work for non-symmetric letters. They let us figure that out on our own. I was sitting in history class not paying attention when it came to me. I drew out the circuit I wanted and couldn't wait to get to electronics class to try it out.
- pjmlp 4y agoThat is way cooler of what we did (earlier 90's), the typical garage door opener. Later on digital circuits, we got to design basic CPUs, with optional breadboard implementation, but no one bothered to go that far for optional stuff.
- djmips 4y agoSeems almost more chips than the Arcade Pong? But really cool. Thanks for sharing it.
- a9h74j 4y agoIn probably 1976 for $1 I bought a one-page schematic for such a thing, from classified ad in the back of a magazine. I suppose it was a related version, but IIRC it relied upon 74123 style monostables.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoThe implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which we did in "Digital Logic" when I was a student, were that you could take any problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates. Of course, in the mid 80's that was a pedagogical tool to lead us toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were still some old-skool EE hackers around who built things like guidance systems for the Navy which were hybrid analogue/digital "computers" totally without CPUs or code. Today we have FPGAs and high level tools for building ASIC, but cheap microprocessors effectively swept aside an entire approach. Maybe we missed something. Many small and well constrained problems in IoT type applications might better be served by hard-configured solutions. They would use less power, be immune to malicious network hacking, not need 'firmware' updates,
- andi999 4y agoThere is a very old Steve Jobs video where he says something like:i dont understand what is special about software, what you cannot do in hardware. Let me see if I can find that.
- the_only_law 4y agoSoftware becomes interesting when I have to make the hardware do things Jobs doesn’t want me to.
- pegasus 4y agoYes! It seems to me this would be the only sane way to build voting machines, especially.