TBEK: Tiny Basic Experimenters Kit (1977)

ittybittycomputers.com

12 points·bootload··3 comments

It really is fascinating how up to a certain point, it was possible to understand the workings of 90% of the early 8-bit computers. Sadly with the vast improvements in speed and efficient comes a cavernous increase in complexity. While the fundamentals of computer architecture haven't changed that much, modern computers are these hugely complex beasts.

I've always been captivated by the Homebrew Computer Club and have been considering putting together a set of tutorials which go through the steps of creating a really basic CPU with an FPGA (perhaps a simple RISC-V core?) and writing a toy OS to run on top of it. A lot of this stuff you learn at Univeristy, but not everyone has that opportunity. I'd like to see a comprehensive guide which walks someone through every step and teaches the fundamentals of computer architecture, hardware design and systems programming in a fun and hands-on way (it's how I've always learnt best).

Would anyone find a 'Retro PC from scratch' resource useful?

It's not too much "retro", but you can find a lot of resources on OSDev:

http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page

The forum is very instructive too:

http://forum.osdev.org/

OSDev does indeed have some great resources, but sadly most of the info is targeting x86. Of course the general principles of interrupts, framebuffer memory etc. can be applied to other platforms provided you have an understanding of the platform. Which I guess is the problem - there are tons of great resources, however to fill in the gaps between them requires a knowledge of the platform which a beginner won't have.

The best approach I've seen so far is the excellent Nand2Tetris, however it can't run on hardware due to the custom HDL it uses.

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