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Build Your Own PDP-11. (heeltoe.com)
42 points by asciilifeform on Aug 4, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



Amazing stuff. Still the guy was already very good at this:

"While I was doing this I was (am) also working on a "real" cpu at a real company doing much the same thing, only on a larger and more grand scale. And my role is much smaller. But I've learned a lot from my day-gig and applied it to this project."

What I wonder about is how much his experience of doing the whole thing on a smaller scale affected his day job, I'd hope that doing the whole thing by himself would give a completely different perspective on the work that he's doing for a living.

One of these days I'm going to get an FPGA development kit and get my hands dirty. The temptation is very large. (I'm holding off because I feel that it might be just too big of a time sink).

I like his debugging technique too, a clock divider to slow down the CPU and a bunch of led displays to show the PC.

When working on one of my own projects I used a bunch of led's hooked up to the printer port, an out command in the main loop would indicate where the program was (or crashed...).


The truly '1337 hacker will simply hold an AM radio next to the board to diagnose a crash.


Only wussies need AM radios. Real hackers can do it just by looking at the board. ;-)


Real hackers don't need boards, they connect the components directly.


Real hardcore hackers don't need components.




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