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 Possibly the most short lived diy processor. 
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Joined: Tue Dec 18, 2018 11:25 am
Posts: 43
Location: Hampshire, UK.
John Peterson was taking Digital Hardware Lab classes at the University of Utah. In the spring quarter of 2012, the individual lab project was to design and build a working computer with serial I/O and a lights and switches front panel. A unique facility of the hardware lab classes was The Suitcase issued to each of the students. It contained everything needed to prototype some complex designs, but it had to be returned at the end of the quarter.

The assignment specification is given in http://www.saccade.com/writing/projects/CS428/PDF/ComputerSpecification.pdf

His system started working about 10 minutes before the quarter officially ended. To quote him :-

Quote:
...After five iterations of the test program (over a period of about two minutes) the CPU was powered off and torn apart. It probably has the record for the shortest operational life of any computer system in history.


http://www.saccade.com/writing/projects/CS428/WireWrap.html#Comp

(Schematics of his computer http://www.saccade.com/writing/projects/CS428/PDF/ComputerSchematics.pdf and his Lab notes http://www.saccade.com/writing/projects/CS428/PDF/ComputerLabNotes.pdf)


Sun Aug 25, 2019 7:14 pm
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Joined: Tue Dec 11, 2012 8:03 am
Posts: 285
Location: California
I have always been very careful in my wire-wrapping, and I have never—not once—had a wrap fail; and I'm regularly using ones I did nearly 30 years ago. OTOH, I have a friend who, in engineering school in 1983, used WW for his senior project. He wasn't as careful and neat in his work. He worked on it late into the night the night before he was supposed to demonstrate it. He took it in, demonstrated it, and it worked for that short time, but no longer worked when he got it back home later than day. He traced the problem down to his poor wire-wrapping.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources


Sun Aug 25, 2019 11:40 pm
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Joined: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:54 pm
Posts: 1780
I like the sound of this suitcase!


Mon Aug 26, 2019 2:00 pm
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Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2017 8:23 am
Posts: 157
Thanks for sharing the details of this fascinating university spring term project.

Somehow I guess I just took all the wrong courses, in the wrong country, at the wrong time.

Nevermind - I'm taking a sabbatical year - starting in 2 weeks, and hope to spend time filling in the gaps of my education.

BTW - I found some very rare 74F219 16x4bit RAMs on ebay today - which hopefully will start me off on my bitslice project.


Thu Aug 29, 2019 9:48 pm
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Joined: Fri Mar 22, 2019 8:03 am
Posts: 328
Location: Girona-Catalonia
monsonite wrote:
Somehow I guess I just took all the wrong courses, in the wrong country, at the wrong time.

I guess you are not alone on that feeling...


Fri Aug 30, 2019 9:17 am
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