NAND gate computer
Kevtris presents this post explaining the process for designing and building this awesome NANDputer:
What is a NANDputer? it’s a computer made out of nothing but NAND gates of course! I dunno why, but I thought it’d be fun to make this. I first had to work out how various parts of a CPU would be made out of NANDs, did a bunch of tests and went to town.
Via Hacked Gadgets.
This entry was posted in hacks and tagged NANDputer.
Comments
Holy schmoly!
Unbelievable and breathtaking… i love it!
But, looking at your blog and imaging all the sweat, labor and pain you must have put into it: Are you sure that your project is not in violation of the international bill of human rights? (just kidding…) ;)
Amazing but not without precidence though. I read that the Apollo Guidance and LEM computers were built out of dual 3 input NOR gates.!
Sure, since you can derive any other logic function such as AND, OR, XOR, NOT from either basic NAND or NOR gates. Still, i would not dare to compare the government-financed Apollo Guidance and LEM systems made by a large team of people with the one-man hobby project that is the NANDputer.
Why not? Many things in computers / electronics have been done by one person that used to take many. Using an FPGA I reproduced a complete VDP that took a team of engineers at TI a year to design and build. Not that I am better than they are, in fact quite the opposite. But modern tools let me do things that used to take many people and many cross disciplines. People are doing system-on-a-chip computers, like the Apple ][, the C64, etc. all the time.
Anyway, more related to this topic, I wonder if Kevin knows that the Cray-1 was built totally with NAND gates? They used three types of ICs in the whole computer, a NAND gate and two types of RAM. They did that because most ICs of the day were too slow. The NAND gate had sub 1ns time, which even for today is very fast.
Building circuits this way is not too far from how ICs are made, although it is certainly tedious for sure, but probably fun for a while.
Didn’t Mr. Spock make one of these on Star Trek? :)