[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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