Reply to post: Cool project, but if you want to have it easy...

This whopping 16-bit computer processor is being built by hand, transistor by transistor

Christian Berger

Cool project, but if you want to have it easy...

As a German engineer, and therefore a rather lazy person, I have to point out that there's a way to make such a computer with _much_ less parts at the expense of speed.

The idea is that you build a bit serial computer. This means that lots of parts will suddenly become a lot simpler. You can still have 16 bit words, but your ALU, for example will just process one bit a time. Your registers become shift registers with a one bit input and a one bit output. All your buses will also have one bit and clock in their values serially.

There's a book describing such a system. I think it's called "Elektronische Rechenmaschinen". I think it describes a 20 bit machine working bit serially. Back in the early days of building computers, reducing the complexity was essential for many teams building a computer. Trading a factor of n in speed for a factor n of complexity seemed a _really_ good idea back then. Particularly since back then as now, computers rarely were fully utilized.

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