4 ms·
One of the most enlightening courses I took in university back in the day was digital electronics. Not because I ever wanted to muck about with it, but because
by henrikschroder 2y ago
One of the most enlightening courses I took in university back in the day was digital electronics. Not because I ever wanted to muck about with it, but because we actually got to build our own super-simple physical 8-bit CPU. We had registers and an ALU and RAM and eight output leds, and we got to write the microcode for the fetch-execute cycle. Clock? There was a physical switch you would toggle on and off to make it step through the cycles to slowly execute the program we wrote in our own machine code. Realizing that instructions are just a bit-pattern saying which unit should write to the bus and which unit should read from the bus was quite eye-opening.
- SoftTalker 2y agoOld minicomputers had toggle switches on the front panel where you could set the program counter, enter machine code instructions, and other things, as well as step the clock. https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images2/1/0619/05/vintage-ti-980-ttl-based-minicomputer_1_1db4cde377bc5377243b34cf2e91f4f4.jpg https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images2/1/0619/05/vintage...
- stonethrowaway 2y agoImage no longer works. Reupload?
- SoftTalker 2y agoIt's not my site. It's the front panel of a Texas Instruments model 980. It's from this page. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-ti-980-ttl-based-minicomputer-2003491642 https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-ti-980-ttl-ba...