Homebrew CPU on February 17, 2010
Presented by: Bill Buzbee,
Date: Wednesday, 17 February 2010, 6:30 PM
Location Hewlett Packard (see directions), Bldg. 48, Oak Room, Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, CA
ABSTRACT
Magic-1 is a completely homebuilt minicomputer. It doesn’t use an off-the-shelf microprocessor, but instead has a custom CPU made out of 74 Series TTL chips. Altogether there are more than 200 chips in Magic-1 connected together with thousands of individually wrapped wires. And, it works. Not only the hardware, but a full software stack. There’s a ANSI C cross-compiler for Magic-1 (retargeted LCC), a fully multi-user, multi-tasking port of the Minix 2 operating system. a TCP/IP stack and hundreds of programs.
Except when I’m working on it, Magic-1 is connected to the net. It serves web pages at http://www.magic-1.org, and by clicking here you can telnet in and play Original Adventure or run a few other old classics such as Eliza, Conway’s Life or Hunt the Wumpus. To log in, use the id “guest” and the password “magic”. Before the Minix port was completed, Magic-1 was running a very simple homebrew operating system. It also had a simple guestbook program. Many thousands of people have telnetted into Magic-1 from around the world, and between 2004 and the summer of 2007 they left 1388 guestbook messages.
BIOGRAPHY
Bill Buzbee
Bill Buzbee is a software engineer at Google, where he is working on a JIT Compiler for the Android platform. He has been a compiler and tools developer for the last 25 years, specializing in dynamic compilation and run-time optimization. Besides Google, Bill is a veteran of HP and Transmeta. Prior to his computing career, he worked as a newspaper journalist at several small daily papers in the Midwest.
Computers are actually a second career for me. I grew up in and around small daily newspapers. I began delivering papers at age 11 and became a part-time sports writer at 13. By the time I went to college in the mid-70′s to get my journalism degree I was the assistant sports editor for the local paper – responsible for stories, layout and headlines for the inside sports pages.
I continued with journalism, eventually becoming the managing editor of the Parsons (Kansas) Sun. During the late 70′s and early 80′s, small daily newspapers were early adopters of computer technology. Excited by the possibilities of using computers for information delivery, I quit my job and headed back to school to learn about computers. My intent was to apply what I’d learned to newspapers – but at the university I became fascinated with computer language and never made it back to the newspaper business.
My homebrewcpu project has gotten vastly more attention that I’ve ever imagined a silly nerd hobby project could get. It also enabled me to finally impress the teen-age daughter. Not for doing my own computer, but for getting a magazine article about me. I was the featured geek in the summer 2005 issue of ExtremeTech Magazine (a PC Magazine spin-off):