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Modeling it in code is cool and all but you skipped out on all the fun and enjoyment (pain and suffering) of troubleshooting your own shitty wiring job by not doing this with discrete hardware on a proto board.

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I started out doing hardware, as you say. Lots of bad soldering (initially). Expensive smoke and shitty chips from Radio Shack that appeared to have had their magic smoke removed prior to being shipped to stores in packaging that definitely was not anti-static. Capacitors that blew up into confetti, diodes that became LEDs for a single, glorious instant. Poking around in the back of old teevee sets and somehow avoiding being electrocuted or thrown against the wall by 30KV waiting patiently in a circuit where the bleed resistor had cracked. Realizing that you're going to need another paper route to afford the buffer chips and board work. Learning that manufacturer data sheets are sometimes full of lies. Redesigning the support circuitry for the CPU to remove just one more chip. Failing a bunch of high school courses because you were writing a BASIC interpreter (in anticipation of working hardware, someday) instead of doing homework.

Oh, I built a working computer, too. That was fun. But when at the end of that project you've got a processor and some RAM and a display sitting there in front of you, well, you realize that you don't really know what to do with the rig. Now what?

Then I realized that I could do far more damage in software (at scale) than with hardware (just one-off workbench class disasters). And so . . .

> Then I realized that I could do far more damage in software (at scale) than with hardware

Haha, this was pretty much it for me too. I'd imagine going down the hardware route is a lot of fun with a lot of lessons learnt, but an expensive lesson.

I might play around with some hardware stuff next though.

Oh yes, I've seen other people do similar things with 8-bit CPUs on a bunch of breadboards which is awesome, maybe I'll attempt that another time!

I did suffer a different form of pain with trying to implement all the gates together in a GP programming language - that was probably a bad idea in hindsight!

I have approached it in two different ways. One was with discrete hardware on breadboards. The other was with VHDL and an FPGA. Out of the two I would say the breadboard method was the most satisfying because at the end you can show it off as wizardry to the two people or maybe three people in your life who love you enough to be bothered by it.

I remember in my college class that went over logic gates and all that, we had to make some circuits in a simulator program. I think we eventually made cycle-based adders in it. I'm pretty sure you could make a full CPU like that too.

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