John’s second entry into the Open 7400 Logic competition is a working computer with serial I/O and a lights ‘n switches front panel.
He built a 8bit CPU with a single accumulator, basic arithmetic (+,-,&,~,<<,>>), conditional branching and subroutines, as well as 1KB of RAM. After building and testing that it works, he unfortunately had to decommission it, since the hardware used to construct it had to be returned to the University. He built this computer entirely out of logic gate ICs, with the exception of a EEPROM and RAM chips, using a proto-board and lots of wire wrapping.
…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.
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