[time-nuts] I want a good micro-controller
Mark Sims
holrum at hotmail.com
Sun Aug 17 12:23:26 UTC 2008
If you want beautiful hardware, there is absolutely nothing more beautiful than the HP9100A and HP-9100B calculators. Not an IC in them (OK a couple of op amps in the card reader), and VERY few transistors, very fast. Stroke CRT display, mag card reader, external data bus, core memory. Microcode was a 16 layer PCB where intersecting traces on different layers were the bits. Micro sequencer was a braid of memory cores. All the internal execution state was stored in mag cores. You could turn the thing off in mid cycle, throw in down a raging flooded river, retreive a year later, hose it off, turn it back on, and it would resume execution where it left off (this actually happened).
See http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp9100.htm
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