I am writing on crafting a microcomputer when I was in the first year of the
university. When the Intel 8080
began to be sold at Akihabara, I wanted to build a microcomputer using the 8080.
Although I had never developed a digital circuit, I bought a set of the
AMD 9080, a second source of the 8080, and eight memory ICs (of 1 kbit),
and I dared to wire the memory circuit using a soldering iron for analog circuits and with 1-mm vinyl cables and a universal circuit board.
This wiring required much more efforts than I expected. It seemed to me a
miracle when the microcomputer worked. But, anyway, I inputted a very short
program using 16 address-input and 8 (8-bit) data-input toggle-switches, and
ran the program. The result was displayed by the 8 LEDs.
It took very much time to input a program by the toggle switches, so
the microcomputer soon became unused after I ran only a few programs.
Until then, I had experiences to build hardwares, such as radios and stereo
amplifiers, but I had almost never touched softwares.
However, in contrast, after the above experience, I seldom touched
hardware but often touched software. That was because
the wiring of the microcomputer was so painful, and I decided not to
build hardware. I can write that this decision led to myself of these years.
Continue...
Keywords: 8080, 9080, Hardware, Microcomputer
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BTW, as shown on the blog top page, the submission date of this page is intentionally set 9999-12-01 00:00:00. However, the actual submission date is 2009-01-18 13:48:24 12:05.
