Soldering is so much faster than wire wrapping, and my last evening’s session proves that. I managed to complete my base memory PCB in two hours, from workshop setup to actual soldering to plugging all parts into their sockets. This exercise was so encouraging that I am seriously considering building the ALU part of the ...
I have finally completed wire-wrapping the CPU’s main board. It consists of 82 ICs, 51 power filter caps, 26 resistors, one oscillator, one power led, one reset button, two HP hexadecimal displays, two 64-pin IDC headers, a molex power connector and lots of AWG 30 kynar wiring. In fact, there is around 1600 wires, and ...
The base memory PCB described in one of the previous posts arrived in mail a week ago. The manufacturing and shipping process took BatchPCB (and USPS) exactly three weeks. Not bad, considering my design was first delivered to them on-line, then they had to lay out an entire panel of other peoples’ designs, then the ...
Last time I mentioned I would be using a standard 19-inch rack mounted case to house my machine. Well, I just got one from eBay. It is a used unit but in a very good condition, and fully tested by the seller. The labels in the back indicate it was decommissioned from Deutsche Post. Unfortunately, ...
I ran out of kynar wire and was forced to take a break from wrapping so I decided to take this opportunity and design a custom PCB for my memory module. Since this was my first attempt to lay out a board, it took me over a week – much longer than I had expected (yes, I ...
Not much to celebrate, progress is still slow. I am working on the project only in short evening sessions, and spending time on other stuff on weekends. The current status is that I have completed the control module wiring, and placed MSW and bus interfaces components on the board. Next, I will continue wiring these ...
