Building electronic projects from 30-year-old articles (was Re: Old Computer Collecting vs Electronics Building)

[Ethan Dicks]

On 2/3/06, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
> In article <f4eb766f0602030407o3dac064amaac33e0f6fb09e0 at mail.gmail.com>,
>     Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>  writes:
> > Two years ago, I built a COSMAC Elf right out of the pages of the
> > 1977-1978 Popular Electronics articles, on perfboard...
>
> Is the Popular Electronis article scanned online?  This sounds kinda
> cool!  And a nice way to get a little experience without damaging
> anything hard to find.

http://www.incolor.com/bill_r/elf/html/elf-1-33.htm

I even used real HP displays (electrically identical to TIL-311s, but
in a different package) and 1822 (5101) 256x4 SRAMs.  If you are
shooting for software compatibility without a slavish devotion to the
1976 appearance, you can use a modern 32Kx8 SRAM and even add a latch
to access memory over 256 bytes (but toggling in that much data is
kinda tedious).

You will find it hard to locate a genuine 1861, but Spare Time Gizmos
has a modern 1861 pin-compatible emulator (a shift register, a
counter, and two 22V10 GALs) that fits in the socket for a real 1861. 
If you don't care about video, you can get a newer 1802 processor and
run the entire thing at 5MHz.

For those that don't know, there's a reasonably active 1802 group on Yahoo...

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cosmacelf/

... I'd recommend it if you want to play with the 1802.

-ethan