What happens when a hacker gets his hands on a heap of 7400-series TTL chips, an oscilloscope and a soldering iron?
In 1975 Wozniak famously made Breakout out of 44 such chips. When the MOS 6502 and Zilog Z80 were launched one year later, his Apple 1 started the microcomputer revolution. But were these processor ICs really necessary for that? After a year of designing, we created a fully functional microcomputer from 36 TTL chips, ROM, RAM, some diodes, etcetera, but most importantly: no microprocessor.
This talk explores the hardware design, the software stack and the capabilities of our result we now call “the Gigatron”
Speaker: Walter Belgers [gigatron.io]
Presented at Pixels Camp v3.0 — 21, 22, 23 March 2019
