Happenings for 2021

Hey all,

As you might have noticed, it's been a while since I've done anything in the pursuit of homebrew CPU's and small computings. With that in mind, my New Year's resolution for 2021 was to get back into the groove of it. 

In the lead up to 2021, I took inventory of my electronic stuff, which has become a bit of a collection of old small computing systems from the 70's, mostly in need of repair. I had the intension of saving them from the land fill so over the holidays before the new year, I started refurbishing one of them. After I got it back together, I started building an expansion card for it to bring it up to modern times. ...Well, modern for an 8-bit computer that runs at ~1.5MHz that is. I'll post some updates about it in the coming days.

Anyway, as a result of all of this activity, I busted out my TTL electronics, breadboards, power supplies and it has reawakened my interest in the homebrew TTL CPU. 

I scrapped my 4-bit CPU last week and I'm going to build a new 8-bit version. Not only that but I'm going to go with instructions in hardware and I'm jettisoning the microcode. I want this thing to be blistering fast and microcode requires to many cycles per instruction. I'm also going to make the computer more modular so I as I build outeach sub-system, I can build it into a card and plug it into a backplane. 

So, stay tuned and I'll plan updates in the coming weeks and months.