Care Package
After reading about BMOW on Slashdot last week, Jim George offered up some Augat wire-wrap boards and old-school ICs that were sitting around gathering dust. His care package arrived today, just in time for a weekend of tinkering.
There are four Augat boards, each one about 7 x 2.5 inches, or about 25% of the area of the BMOW system board. Each board has space for five columns of skinny DIP 0.3 inch chips. The undersides (not shown) are pre-populated with about 600 wire-wrap pins.
Jim also threw in a few dozen wire-wrap tags, which are just little plastic cards with holes in them that can be placed on the pin side of the board, showing where the chips are placed and marking the pin numbers. I can’t believe I built all of BMOW without these. They seem like such an obvious thing. Staring at a featureless green board with a thousand pins on it, it’s easy to get disoriented without markers like these.
To round out the package, Jim also included a handful of 7400 series logic chips, and other related parts:
- 74AS181 x 5, 4-bit ALU
- 74ALS374 x 11, 8-bit register
- 74F323 x 7, 8-bit shift register
- 74F299 x 6, 8-bit shift register
- 6116 x 3, 2K x 8 SRAM
- Intel 8255 peripheral interface adapter
Thank you Jim!
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Hello!
That’s nice. That ALU can be worked into a full system, as Bill B. how he did it.
What were the “other related parts”?
Right-o, BMOW used a pair of 74XX181’s for its ALU too.
The other non-7400 parts were the 6116 SRAMs, and the 8255 PIA.
Aha!
Okay, as it happens a pair of articles on the subject of what happens here appeared in Byte magazine about 22 years(!) in the September and October issues. The author there took much the same steps that Bill B. did except that he used a programming language called AHPL to quite literally synthesize the entire system.
Eventually it sat atop one of the better machines from Tandy. (No not a TRS-80!) It turns out that these articles were the inspiration towards the one that Bill B. designed.
Yours on the other hand could be considered its next big step.
The 6116s are shaped as it were to be the same basic configuration as a 2716. Ideally you could build your next system to use the required number of 2716s to hold the monitor and the 6116s to hold the things that SRAM does.
Oh and writing the microcode that the SN74181 (or SN74S181) uses can be considered the stranger form of programming.
Sweet!
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