The Computer We All Wish We’d Had In The 8-Bit Era

The 8-bit home computers of yore that we all know and love, without exception as far as we are aware, had an off the shelf microprocessor at heart. In 1983 you were either in the Z80 camp or the 65…

A Journey Into Unexpected Serial Ports

Through all the generations of computing devices from the era of the teleprinter to the present day, there’s one interface that’s remained universal. Even though its usefulness as an ev…

Rebuilding The First Digital Personal Computer

When thinking of the first PCs, most of us might imagine something like the Apple I or the TRS-80. But even before that, there were a set of computers that often had no keyboard, or recognizable di…

Single-Stepping The 6502 Processor

Although marketing folk and laypeople may credit [Steve Jobs] as the man behind the success of Apple, those in the tech world know the real truth that without [Steve Wozniak] nothing would have eve…

The Other Kind Of Static Hazard To Your Logic Circuits

We’ve all heard of the dangers of static electricity when dealing with electronics, and we all take the proper precautions when working with static-sensitive components — don’t we…

Only 8 Chips Make A CPU

We’re no stranger to homemade CPUs on these pages, but we think that [Jiri Stepanovsky]’s 16-bit serial CPU might be a little special. Why? It has an astonishingly low chip count, with …

Nature TTL Photographer of the Year Competition

The Nature TTL POTY competition is open for entries. Celebrating wildlife, landscape, macro, and nature photos.

MikroLeo, A 4-Bit Retro Learning Platform

MikroLeo is a discrete TTL logic-based microcomputer intended for educational purposes created by [Edson Junior Acordi], an Electronics Professor at the Brazilian Federal Institute of Paraná, Brazi…

A Well Documented BreadBoard Computer Shows Dedication

These pages have not been exactly devoid of home-built computers, with those constructed on solderless breadboard less frequent, but still not rarities. But what is more of a rarity is this ground-…

BreadBin Is An 8-bit TTL CPU On A Breadboard, In A Bread Bin

Building a CPU out of logic gates is a great way to learn about the inner workings of microprocessors, and we’ve seen several impressive projects in this area. [c0pperdragon] set himself the …

Creating Video From A ROM

We’re used to computers with display screens, yet how many of us have created the circuitry to drive one directly? Sure, we’ve coded up an SPI display driver on a microcontroller, but c…

VGA From Scratch On A Homebrew 8-bit Computer

[James Sharman] has built an impressive 8-bit homebrew computer. Based on TTL logic chips, it has a pipelined design which makes it capable of Commodore-level computing, but [James] hasn’t qu…