[ Home ] [ New Stuff ] [ Minix Port ] [ Magic-2? ] [ Overview ] [ Photo Gallery ] [ Construction ] [ Technical Info ] [ My Other Projects ] [ Links ]

In the beginning....

Magic-1 really began during a lunchtime discussion with Ken Sumrall at Vito's Pizza in Sunnyvale, CA sometime in the Spring of 2001.  I was complaining to Ken about how as a compiler writer I was woefully ignorant about how CPU hardware really worked.  I hadn't taken any electronics classes in college, and was only vaguely aware of what transistors, resistors and capacitors were.   Ken recalled an old series of magazine articles by Forrest Mims on building a very simple CPU from TTL parts, and suggested I read it.  Over the next few weeks, I tracked down those articles, as well as Mims' "Understanding Digital Computers" and a textbook by Albert Paul Malvino, "Digital Computer Electronics."

I read them all, and when I next had lunch with Ken at Vito's I reported back that it all seemed much clearer now - so much so that I thought I could even build a CPU myself.  Then Ken said, "well, why don't you?".

Why not, indeed?

And so the Magic-1 project began.

Using the 4-bit CPU designs in the Mims and Malvino books as a starting point, over the summer of 2001 I gradually worked out the basic shape of my Magic architecture.  All of my design and sketch work was done by hand on graph paper and kept in a binder.  However, by the Fall of 2001 it was clear to me that I needed some better way of organizing my work.  I decided to set up a development website to hold the project.  That way, I could refer to it anywhere and any time.  That decision turned out to be one of my better ones, and this website was born.

Construction Photo Diaries

Since the beginning of this web site, I've been frequently updating development diaries.  The ones mostly dealing with design may be found under Technical Info, and are almost entirely words.  Once I started construction, though, I started putting together photo diaries to document my progress.  They are broken down by task, and have some temporal overlap.  Here they are:

Timeline

I've generated a large amount of material on Magic-1 - most of it pretty uninteresting.  To help locate the interesting parts, here is a timeline of the project with links to supporting material: