About the TTL CPU Website

For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated with computers and electronics. Some of my earliest memories include my grade 2 teacher reading a newspaper article about this university student who made a digital box called the 'Blue Box' to hack into the phone systems. His name was Steve Wozniac and four or five years later he would create the first Apple computer. I also remember earlier in about 1969/70 when my dad took me to the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Computer Science Open House where they had terminals running into a massive computer that filled an entire room. I think they might have been playing the game 'Lunar Lander' on the computer but I can't really remember. I do remember they had a dot matrix printer and they printed out some sheets for us but beyond that I can't recall what was on them. Anyway, at some point I decided I needed to have one of these computers even if I didn't really know what I was going to use it for.

I've built quite a few computers including early 8-bit micro computers that were precursors to todays PC's but I've always wanted to build one right from scratch so I could get a better idea of how they work. It's a bit like taking a clock apart to figure it out. Once you sort of know how it works, you want to try to make one from scratch just to see if it will actually work. It doesn't need to be accurate as long as it measures time and works the way you intend it to.

I've started building a 4-bit computer using TTL (transistor transistor logic). TTL logic chips are a pretty old technology by todays standards but they're about as basic as it gets as far as logic gates, counters, buffers and registers are concerned. They're also easy to acquire, reasonably priced and hard to break so for me they're the best technology to work with. I've added some photos and information about the project in the My 4-Bit TTL CPU page.