The Gigatron TTL Computer without a Microprocessor

The Gigatron TTL Computer without a Microprocessor
The 8-Bit Guy
One of my favorite classes back in college was machine logic. We studied the transistor constructs called gates - AND gates, OR gates, NAND gates - and how they could be combined to build things like registers, adders and multipliers. Once you have that, you can build a computer. Didn't actually do that because by that time computers were being built with integrated circuits that contained zillions of transistors. Building your own computer without integrated circuits would have been like building your own automobile engine starting with a pile of iron ingots. You could do it, but you would need either a very good reason or an unholy obsession.

I spent a couple of years programming an 8-bit microcontroller. All my code was written on a PC and then downloaded into the target board through a serial port. There were some challenges, mainly with the machine-code hoops you had to jump through to access extended memory. It wasn't terribly fast, but you could download 100KB of code in a couple of minutes.

So this video was a nice trip down memory lane. When I saw the case and heard his description of the manual I was afraid it was going to a rich-kids play pretty, like a thousand dollars, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it only cost $200. I'd buy one, but it would just sit on the shelf waiting for me to get a round toit, and round toits, as we all know, are in short supply.