[blastrat]

I really wish he'd document even the barest scraps of the CPU architecture. Is it microcoded? There's 7400 series like 7402 or 7473, and there's 7400 series like 74154, 74181, etc.

"hey kid, I built one of these too, back in the day, and it was damn hard and time consuming, but oh a labor of love. I had no internet, nor any schooling. I read articles in Popular Electronics and I read the TI 7400 series databook. Then I reread them. Then I reread them." Yes, in fact it was snowing, uphill, and I in fact had no shoes!

[vvanders]

That reminds me of my favorite project of all time, the 7400 FPGA:

http://blog.notdot.net/2012/10/Build-your-own-FPGA

[nickpsecurity]

Never saw that one. Wild stuff. Here's the latest on open FPGA's:

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43...

[jackqu7]

Completely agree, this was just the first foray into documenting this project and I wanted to make it less heavy on the details of the hardware to reach a wider audience. I'm definitely going to put up a more technical post and the sources/schematics as soon as I can.

To answer your questions, it's hard wired with the control logic made out of the simpler chips (7400, 7408, 7432 etc) but the rest of the system does contain more complex chips, the 74181 ALUs being the largest.

[extrapickles]

Judging from the small number of chips in the photograph, they used the higher integration 74 series logic rather than the lower level flip-flop/NAND type.