VHDL is for the industry. This is a homemade project made by someone who is passionate about computers and really wants to build it from scratch using actual hardware. What's the point of doing it in VHDL ? You might as well just buy a computer. Your comment is very unnecessary and quite rude.
@@PauloConstantino167 Umm both are impressive. The VHDL is the same basic process as far as CPU design it just means you dont have to worry about bad parts and the like during the debug process. why crap on VHDL?
VHDL (without using any existing modules) is logically equivalent to building it by hand. That is, if you can do it with VHDL, then you can do it by hand too, which requires a special kind of dedication and craftsmanship, which in itself is worthy of praise. But equating writing VHDL to buying a computer is ignorant.
Jaw down. As industrial systems designer I strongly admire You for very deep knowledge about digital systems. Many years ago I was built my first computer from old calculator parts based on Z-80 CPU, 1kB RAM and 2kB EPROM running built-in monitor program (simple machine code and memory editor). But I never even think about building whole computer based on MSI TTL circuits. Today I may buy whole computer integrated in one LSI chip for few bucks, and made system much easily. Again - salute for Your amazing work.
15 seconds into your video and I am having a "nostalgasm"! I designed and constructed several machine vision processors on those same Eurocard boards in the early 90s. Non contact measurement systems for the lumber and metal industries. The company was called Applied Scanning Technology. Anyone remember them? I sure do miss those days!
What wonderful workmanship, Bill, and great explanations. As an old DEC employee, and electronics hacker, who had to understand this stuff back then, this really got the brain a-cooking. Amazing power and integration (even Magic!) in that box. Thank you so much for posting it!
I have "built" a computer using 3 wire wrap cards on S-100 bus, and that was using a 80186 CPU, and Intel DRAM memory controller and many other LSI chips - that was super hard already, and getting it to run CPM in a stable manner took time. I can only imagine how much harder it was to build your own CPU. You sir are awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to create this video, the web page, etc.
Wow- just, wow.... Thank you so much for documenting this!!! What an amazing machine! It's amazing enough that it is a homebrew CPU, and it works- but, it is clearly powerful enough to run a UNIX-like operating system. And, you share it online. Incredible!!!
This is one of the coolest things I've seen. Having worked in central offices for many phone companies, I've done my fair share of wire wrapping, but have seen very few boards like these working together using single wires like a PCB. I have no problem messing up wrapping a T1. I can't imagine laying this many wires in, especially with their individual routes on each board, and connections from board to board. Reminds me of the back planes of older telephone switch boards, but even they were PCB since I've been working on them. I've recently suddenly found myself wanting to know more about how computers work, and how programming and computer hardware work together to get things done. This is pretty much the coolest example I've seen of a DIY solution to create both essentially from scratch. (I'm sure that Linux based OS took some tweaking) Thanks for sharing, and again, awesome job!
I recall the one computer actually commercially made for home and business use. The TRS 80 Model 2000. It had a graphics board that had Kynar jumps and mods to the point of looking at it and wondering why they just did not scrap the whole thing and start over to redesign it. A spaghetti mess, overall. That computer had only one unique thing about it. It ran on an Intel 80186 CPU chip. An orphan even at the time. It was the PC that was 70 percent compatible to the IBM PC that its custom version of DOS. A true failure in the Hit or Miss gamble that the software you wanted to run, would run. It was ahead of everything of the day, but way too much a flop due to its over engineered, design.
It's probably worthwhile updating this video description with links to Ben Eater's series on how to make a breadboard computer. He explains the hardware and software principles very well, and anyone who understands the concepts should be able to expand them to make their own computer if they feel so inclined.
I just wanted to tell you how awesome this is. It's so sad that the majority of the population will never understand what you've done here. I subscribed to your channel a while back when that stupid Ahmed kid who was praised because he ripped a clock's inside and put it into a case pretended to be "building CPU's and soldering them" so I looked up whether there are people who actually create stuff like this from scratch. Not even saying I entirely understand what's happening in your magic box as I am just an App dev and the "deepest" thing I've done was to add two numbers in assembler but man you are insane, loving it!
It would take me years to do this, even if I had the instructions. You basically done the first 50years of computing from scratch. Most people will never know the amount of work and effort 100's of people went through to get just to the 1990's. People dedicated their lives to making the simplest of programs on the most basic hardware. I wish i could do even half this.
Just look at the views, at this time of the comment 45k. This is such an amazing feat. (although it has been done) Personally it should be 45million if you think about the knowledge and time put into this.
I'm building a system that comes nowhere close to being a full-fledged CPU. It's more of a glorified sequencer. But yes, there are standard TTL and CMOS components specifically intended for building your own arbitrary CPU designs.
@1:43 - and it began to learn at a geometric rate, it achieved self awareness at 2:14 AM. In a panic... Lol. In all seriousness. Magic perhaps. Engineartistry to be certain. She's truly a thing of beauty.
You were there, working and having fun with computers before I was even born! Now that I am old enough to appreciate the world around me, I want to go down the same path you did when you made Magic-1. Thank you for telling your story, for taking part in creating the technology that I used to type this very message. I look up to you, Bill.
Bill, you probably got a message tonight on the console. Thanks for letting me play, I really love Magic-1 and have tremendous respect for what you've done with it. Hope you're not offended by "who" sent the message, I'm not sure if you meant that to be open or not - but it was fun to find a different way to reach you. --ken :)
Also I don't think people realise how monstrously impressive this computer is. Back in the day when 7400 series logic was being using to make computers, I don't think there was a single CPU that used it that could demand paging and had a 4 MHz clock, let alone one that could do all that and fit into less than 1 cubic meter and be powered by a -65- 650 watt power supply. This is incredible for the work of one man over about a year!
From what I understood from seeing first 15 mins of the video, the entire logic is built with 7400 ICs along with the control unit and other stuff. It has a custom (non x86) instruction set and you wrote a C compiler, and linker, loader which you used to compile minix and other stuff to executables magic-1 can execute. Is the nic also made from 7400 ICs? Anyway, that's a hell lot of work. I can think of making no more than a calculator with 74s. In these days of mostly high level programming, seeing projects like these re-ignite those fun filled memories of college. Absolutely beautiful!
Wow! Amazing work and dedication! We built and designed a small CPU with VHDL and loaded it onto an FPGA. That was fun and educational, but this is *so* much more. The memory management, wire wrapping, and microcode design are simply fantastic!!
I've been logging into magic-1.org about once a year for the past six or seven years. I play a few turns of advent, get a load of that sweet M.E.C.C. ASR33 teletype nostalgia, and log off. Today I showed my 9 and 10 year old kids, and they really got into advent. They begged me to teach them how to make a map. As always, I marvel at your ingenious TTL CPU, and drool over those blinkenlights. Thanks for this video. I feel my comprehension has doubled from say, 2% to 4%.
And here I am playing with my Rapsberry PI oblivious of all the underlaying micro electronics complications that this guy built by hand! Well done mate, well done.
Thank you for sharing this awesome experience of yours, I'm really in awe by what you created there. I myself designed a 8-Bit CPU with a 4-Bit Adress Bus and thus a whopping 16 Byte of RAM integrated, all on a common Bus. I was able to run Fibonacci to 233, which basically was the most complicated programme to fit into 16 Bytes. I'm at the verge of actually constructing this CPU out of TTL, mainly the 74HC series just for the sake of doing it. Your work is very inspirational. Thanks again. Kind regards, Meta Custom Computers
So cool to see this video. Back around 2005 when I first got interested in building a computer from the ground up, and was wondering how practical such a thing would even be, your website was one of the first things I stumbled across. It, and the others on the webring were a wealth of information and inspiration. Thanks for sharing all this with us. Here's to 10 more years of Magic!
I've dropped in on the Magic 1 webpage from time to time over the years. Totally cool. I doff my hat to you Sir for some amazing and inspirational work. Keep it up :-)
That my friend his love and dedication to design this and make it happen is overwhelming. Thousands of hours of time spent. I couldn't do it, but I got a lot of respect for the person who did. I love Electronics. technology is based on more technology. But you have to understand the technology of the old days to appreciate the new technology of today and the future thank you for sharing us I can't believe you did it my biggest breadboard project was 2 ft by 2ft I can't imagine how big that is you've got sitting there in that box amazing
Fantastic! Congratulations to Magic-1 for running strong for 10 years (even if it needed a new PSU!). Thanks for sharing your project Bill. It inspired mine to do my own, and while exams have put it off again and again for the past 6 years, I will finally be free to start it soon! It's wonderful to get to know more about it, especially to get a talk through demo!
Awesome. Not only that you were able to produce working CPU, but also the dedication tht you put in to finish the project, and to write and maintain the software.
This is brilliant. I think we'd all love to hear more about computing in the 1970's and 1980's, if you have any spare time to make videos. Everything computers do these days seems so far removed from registers and memory addresses. We've come a long way, but I think it makes it much harder to understand exactly how the machine works on the fundamental level.
Most people cannot even fathom how an Electro-Mechanical Pinball machine works. But those are the building blocks of logic, memory, and such that made up what computers evolved from.
This is great! Just been playing adventure on here with my 6yo daughter in London. She was blown away that she was using a computer on the other side of the world (even though she technically does that every time she puts Netflix on) and we were both very impressed that you made it yourself.
I've known about Magic-1 for about 5 years or so and telnetted in a bunch of times (mostly to play Paranoia :) ), so this is a really fascinating video for me. Thanks for keeping the magic (and the Magic) alive, Bill!
I never had a chance to meet Magic-1 in person but I think I speak for many others when I say that it's been a great inspiration for the last 10 years! Thanks for posting this awesome video, and thanks for the Magic, Bill!
I'm totally filled with nostalgia now! Excellent and wonderful design, craftsmanship, and tutorial! Building your own computer architecture and writing the microcode and software. Then porting Tanenbaum's Minix... wow!
I just came up from my "lab" where I'm building a custom z80-based computer. Now I just want to go down to the lab and get back to work due to inspiration :) I'm hoping to start something totally custom akin to Magic-1 eventually, but still have much to learn. Nice work on this. It's absolutely inspiring.
If your serious about your comment, contact me about the architecture I'm coming up with. It's superscaler super computer. Do you want my phone number.
To all the gamers who "build their own PCs": putting cards in slots and screwing in a power supply is not building a PC, it's putting one together, THIS is building a PC.
The most deserving person I have ever subscribed to. Amazingly informative video. I learned loads, and you kept me interested throughout the entire video. I usually get bored half way through long videos, was able to watch yours start to finish.
This is pretty impressive, protected process memory is pretty unique for a home brew machine, I can tell you have worked on some of the old minicomputers back in the day. Getting minix running on a home brew machine is also very impressive.
Hi Bill, a really awesome project and very nicely presented in your video! I knew about your project but I did not realise you have this 10th anniversary video, which is very clear shows how far you've gone. In these types of projects often the software part doesn't the love and effort you've demonstrated here. Very cool that you ported Minix over. I once upon a time also played around with Minix, and wrote a hard disk driver for the IBM PS/2 Model 70 I had at the time, so I've scratched the surface. Great job!
I've watched this several times and Magic-1 never ceases to amaze me. It is a fantastic achievement, Bill. I wish I had the patience to see a project like this through to the end!
Hi Bill. Just after waking up, I found this nugget of gold on youtube. Just want to thankyou for making my day, mate! I wish there was more of this type of content. Off to your website now to feed my brain with the schematics ;)
The corrections on the website made me chuckle. Thanks for this video, it's rather inspirational. I'm still in the prototyping stage of my own computer. Making magnetic particles for the drum memory/NVRAM turned out quite tricky. And I think I will sacrifice the idea of only using pnp transistors for a lower power consumption.
I need to build something like this! I've tried to make a simple computer based on the Z80 microprocessor but I have never made a CPU from scratch, this really inspires me!
I love it!! This is awesome on many levels. Thank you for sharing it with us. I played around a little on the Telnet with it. Very cool! Boy, that adventure game brought back memories! Thanks again!
This project is amazing! I'm looking into what it would take for me to design build my own computer from discrete components, and seeing people that actually have achieved this is inspiring. Thank you for sharing!
Fantastic video! It is cool to think about how your work helped make my OQO 01 possible!! I just wanted to thank you for your time in doing these videos! It is amazing work to follow and your enthusiasm is very evident! I particularly liked the instruction execution walk through.
I really love this! thanks for sharing and keeping it open, I'm studying Computer Engineering myself so naturally i find home brew computers really fascinating! also left you a message in the home dir. :)
This is just amazing, greetings from Italy! I tried to write you a message on HiFromItaly in the guest home directory, but unfortunately I was lagging badly and after writing a couple of words into the file the system disconnected me... anyways, brilliant work here
The only at chip level programming I got involved with, was with PIC chips. Those are at low level, microchips that are close to what Rasberry Pi, or Arduino does today. Only those were tons less complex. So my accomplishment to the world was that we (me and my former employer, Colby, (RIP) were able to design our own 2-way radio repeater morse code ID and repeater controller. Most if it was timing loops, and forming a beep tone, in morse code. For what little it did, still took nearly a month of trial and error programming. It all fit on a one-off 3-inch square board, with a handful of parts. The engineering behind it all was to produce something that worked as good as a commercial unit that cost $200 or so, with a total cost of about $20.00. Due to the simplicity of the design, it just did not fail at any point over at least 3-4 years of use. Granted while we wrote it all using a Commodore 64 computer, but was simply that the DigiKey kit, was designed to run on that computer, and not that it ran on the C64 computer, but ran on the PIC chip. Not bad for what little experience I had writing at the machine level. But really it turns out far easier to write things at the machine level than to have to figure out in the brain how to write it using C or Pascal, or whatever compiler you chose. But the PIC chips did use a very good structure, dedicated to the task. I think the entire program was well under 1K in size. 90 percent of it was table lookups and timing loops to get things. The rest being countdown loops, and controls to monitor traffic, and control the radio system it got interfaced to.
Thanks for this wonderful insight on your project. I am interested in logic chips, and how cpus work i am going to build one even if it takes me ages. homebrew computers are where pcs sprang from and wanting to have a deeper understanding of things is human nature.
Sorry Bill, I think I just killed your ultimate machine. :) I ran some Basic code which supposed to draw a circle but couldn't stop the execution doing so from Android telnet client which didn't have ctrl+c/break key combination in standard Android keyboard obviously. Now, telnet server seems to be completely dead. I hope Magic-1 is OK and didn't catch fire. :)
Wow..you took me back to my childhood electronic computer building days :) Now how many today would know how to to even write a program in Hexa code :)
We (a small team) did programming of a TI 960 back in the 1980's into the 90 s ... it provided front panel access to machine resources too ... learned quite a bit from that exercise ... later I did a wire-wrap Z80 and used an early HP logic analyzer to debug 256 byte deep pieces of program code ... compilation, of course, done on a 386-based PC in the 90's ...
Super inspirational! I'm in the process of designing my own computer, I will use either a 6502 or Z80. But it's just great to see this made of low level ICs and the wire wrapping looks almost insane.
The first, last, and only TTL-based CPU I ever played with was the Wang 2200 minicomputer, and this was back in the late '70s / early '80s. My Dad owned two of them for his business. It was the first computer I ever learned to program on. Wang Basic. :-)
Ten years ago when this video was new youtube recommended it to me and i was fascinated about the whole concept of building a computer from scratch. Not the first video or project that pushed me to that direction. But one of the first. Now ten years later still. RUclips pushes it into my recommendations and. Dang it's an amazing project i really want to build one something like that myself. But. Eh. Chronic prograstination. In these ten years between, i have learned assembly and a lot of soldering but haven't done anything to start my own TTL computer. Maybe some day. Not now either, got some problems programming my quadruped robo thingy. But if i get the time and energy.
Bit of trivia, TTL is short for Transistor Transistor Logic, each of the logic gates used to build all the circuits in the TTL CPU are built using Transistors that are inside TTL integrated circuits, originally TTL circuitry was built using discrete Transistors before integrated circuits were invented.
Cool! I always toyed with the idea of doing one, but due to time and cost.... Glad to see someone did! In the video, you don't actually show the ALU board. What are you using? Chained 74181 chips? I was surprised to find some of the classic games there too. BSD Backgammon, and I swear that's the old DECUS RSTS/E BASIC Plus 2 Star Trek that I used to play on a PDP-11/44 after school. Thanks for making this available for everyone! PS: The session kept crashing and disconnecting. I left a text file to inform you. After reading here below though, might have been some jerk portscanning or something.
For the ALU I'm using a variant of the 74181 - the 74F381/2. Basically the same functionality, but in a 20-pin package. And yes, chained along with a 74F182 fast carry lookahead. The ALU lives on the "Register Card" - which is the most dense and last one I show in the video. Sorry about the session getting dropped. I suspect a bug in the device driver I wrote for the Wiznet ethernet interface. It does seem to happen more frequently when Magic-1 is getting pounded on by scripts.
I find wire wrap to be a thing of beauty. I just wish the sockets and boards weren't so darn expensive. It's cheaper to have a PCB made overseas. But wrapping is just so satisfying.
What I missed seeing here was an AM radio tuned up. I used to use one with the Altair 8800 and MITS 8080, for example, to "hear" my programs. Very easy to tell if it crashed that way!! And also to listen to where the code is at, from time to time. Many folks wrote "music" programs which would play tones on the AM radio, too! Would be nice to let others see how that works.
Did you get the wire wrap boards for this from new-old-stock? Sadly nobody seems to make them anymore, and vintage NOS is insanely priced on fleabay :(
Bill Buzbee Thanks for the reply! I should check the old local mom'n'pop place, now that you mention it People may call wire wrapping obsolete, but it's so cool, "easy" and useful
Sory 4 my inglish- I drove through a black lives matter event yesterday... LMAO! Awesome computer, even looks tidy and neat. Love it. I remember the game rouge. That was incredulous... Love your device there sir. Good work.
I worked on the Univac 1219B, an 18-bit transistor computer, in the Navy. We programmed it by poking bits into the instruction register three at a time with three fingers (six octal values total) then pressing another switch to advance the program counter.
One of our local high schools in the 80s had the old Altair 8080 with 4K of ram, which is as close as you go to what this is, but this CPU is by far more advanced than that was. They had TTY unit, and paper tape reader writer. And it had form fed paper, as a display. That was the most basic computer system I had ever seen at the time.
Couldn't get to the server per se. But it seems you got it to work for what you wanted it to do. If I were to take up the same I would have created a 32-bit processor as close as I could to a DEC VAX 11/785. OS wise I would have to create that from scratch as I wouldn't want Windows, UNIX, OS2 or whatever. I would try to recreate the PC version of VMS that I wrote back in the 80's. Really that was why I was writing it so I could test it out before investing time and effort in creating the processor. The DEC version at the time was 31 boards for the processor, 6 -8 if I remember right for memory. Then you have the mass bus and unibus with about 6-8 cards. These days, I think most of it could be compressed into a FPGA chips to reduce the seer number of boards. Just wished I had the schematics I had at the time.
i made it all tot the end of the video, i was really impressed how you have build it. i would love tot learn more about desinging and building something like this where van i find the best information with considiration i have absolutely zero experience
+jonathan beibier Jonathan, check out the "links" page at my project website - homebrewcpu.com. I list the books and other material that taught me how to do this project. And, note that I had little electronics experience before I started the project (I'm a software guy). It's actually not that difficult - just a state machine.
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When people say they've "built" their computer... yeah building a lego set is more complex. THIS is building a computer
VHDL is for the industry. This is a homemade project made by someone who is passionate about computers and really wants to build it from scratch using actual hardware. What's the point of doing it in VHDL ? You might as well just buy a computer. Your comment is very unnecessary and quite rude.
VHDL is substantially harder than "just [buying] a computer." Not to say it's the same as this, but programming an FPGA is no joke.
I am speaking from the point of view of a hardware engineer, so VHDL is a joke. :)
@@PauloConstantino167 Umm both are impressive. The VHDL is the same basic process as far as CPU design it just means you dont have to worry about bad parts and the like during the debug process. why crap on VHDL?
VHDL (without using any existing modules) is logically equivalent to building it by hand. That is, if you can do it with VHDL, then you can do it by hand too, which requires a special kind of dedication and craftsmanship, which in itself is worthy of praise. But equating writing VHDL to buying a computer is ignorant.
Jaw down. As industrial systems designer I strongly admire You for very deep knowledge about digital systems. Many years ago I was built my first computer from old calculator parts based on Z-80 CPU, 1kB RAM and 2kB EPROM running built-in monitor program (simple machine code and memory editor). But I never even think about building whole computer based on MSI TTL circuits. Today I may buy whole computer integrated in one LSI chip for few bucks, and made system much easily. Again - salute for Your amazing work.
15 seconds into your video and I am having a "nostalgasm"! I designed and constructed several machine vision processors on those same Eurocard boards in the early 90s. Non contact measurement systems for the lumber and metal industries. The company was called Applied Scanning Technology. Anyone remember them? I sure do miss those days!
What is even more fascinating than you building that computer is you being able to get minix up and running.
What wonderful workmanship, Bill, and great explanations. As an old DEC employee, and electronics hacker, who had to understand this stuff back then, this really got the brain a-cooking. Amazing power and integration (even Magic!) in that box. Thank you so much for posting it!
I have "built" a computer using 3 wire wrap cards on S-100 bus, and that was using a 80186 CPU, and Intel DRAM memory controller and many other LSI chips - that was super hard already, and getting it to run CPM in a stable manner took time. I can only imagine how much harder it was to build your own CPU.
You sir are awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to create this video, the web page, etc.
Wow- just, wow.... Thank you so much for documenting this!!! What an amazing machine! It's amazing enough that it is a homebrew CPU, and it works- but, it is clearly powerful enough to run a UNIX-like operating system. And, you share it online. Incredible!!!
This is one of the coolest things I've seen. Having worked in central offices for many phone companies, I've done my fair share of wire wrapping, but have seen very few boards like these working together using single wires like a PCB. I have no problem messing up wrapping a T1. I can't imagine laying this many wires in, especially with their individual routes on each board, and connections from board to board. Reminds me of the back planes of older telephone switch boards, but even they were PCB since I've been working on them. I've recently suddenly found myself wanting to know more about how computers work, and how programming and computer hardware work together to get things done. This is pretty much the coolest example I've seen of a DIY solution to create both essentially from scratch. (I'm sure that Linux based OS took some tweaking) Thanks for sharing, and again, awesome job!
Minix is not a Linux based OS.
I recall the one computer actually commercially made for home and business use. The TRS 80 Model 2000. It had a graphics board that had Kynar jumps and mods to the point of looking at it and wondering why they just did not scrap the whole thing and start over to redesign it. A spaghetti mess, overall. That computer had only one unique thing about it. It ran on an Intel 80186 CPU chip. An orphan even at the time. It was the PC that was 70 percent compatible to the IBM PC that its custom version of DOS. A true failure in the Hit or Miss gamble that the software you wanted to run, would run. It was ahead of everything of the day, but way too much a flop due to its over engineered, design.
It's probably worthwhile updating this video description with links to Ben Eater's series on how to make a breadboard computer. He explains the hardware and software principles very well, and anyone who understands the concepts should be able to expand them to make their own computer if they feel so inclined.
I just wanted to tell you how awesome this is. It's so sad that the majority of the population will never understand what you've done here.
I subscribed to your channel a while back when that stupid Ahmed kid who was praised because he ripped a clock's inside and put it into a case pretended to be "building CPU's and soldering them" so I looked up whether there are people who actually create stuff like this from scratch.
Not even saying I entirely understand what's happening in your magic box as I am just an App dev and the "deepest" thing I've done was to add two numbers in assembler but man you are insane, loving it!
It would take me years to do this, even if I had the instructions. You basically done the first 50years of computing from scratch.
Most people will never know the amount of work and effort 100's of people went through to get just to the 1990's. People dedicated their lives to making the simplest of programs on the most basic hardware.
I wish i could do even half this.
Just look at the views, at this time of the comment 45k. This is such an amazing feat. (although it has been done) Personally it should be 45million if you think about the knowledge and time put into this.
Well said mate but I don't even aim for "half" of that, I'd be happy about 5% already hahahaha
I'm building a system that comes nowhere close to being a full-fledged CPU. It's more of a glorified sequencer. But yes, there are standard TTL and CMOS components specifically intended for building your own arbitrary CPU designs.
He knows how awesome it is. That's why he built it. Laughing here. :)
@1:43 - and it began to learn at a geometric rate, it achieved self awareness at 2:14 AM. In a panic... Lol.
In all seriousness. Magic perhaps. Engineartistry to be certain. She's truly a thing of beauty.
You were there, working and having fun with computers before I was even born! Now that I am old enough to appreciate the world around me, I want to go down the same path you did when you made Magic-1.
Thank you for telling your story, for taking part in creating the technology that I used to type this very message. I look up to you, Bill.
Bill, you probably got a message tonight on the console. Thanks for letting me play, I really love Magic-1 and have tremendous respect for what you've done with it. Hope you're not offended by "who" sent the message, I'm not sure if you meant that to be open or not - but it was fun to find a different way to reach you. --ken :)
Also I don't think people realise how monstrously impressive this computer is. Back in the day when 7400 series logic was being using to make computers, I don't think there was a single CPU that used it that could demand paging and had a 4 MHz clock, let alone one that could do all that and fit into less than 1 cubic meter and be powered by a -65- 650 watt power supply. This is incredible for the work of one man over about a year!
From what I understood from seeing first 15 mins of the video, the entire logic is built with 7400 ICs along with the control unit and other stuff. It has a custom (non x86) instruction set and you wrote a C compiler, and linker, loader which you used to compile minix and other stuff to executables magic-1 can execute. Is the nic also made from 7400 ICs? Anyway, that's a hell lot of work. I can think of making no more than a calculator with 74s. In these days of mostly high level programming, seeing projects like these re-ignite those fun filled memories of college.
Absolutely beautiful!
Greetings from Italy, your "M-1" is truly magnificent! As an electronic engineer I can understand how difficult and beautiful is your "hobby". :D
Happy 15th anniversary Magic-1!
Wow! Amazing work and dedication! We built and designed a small CPU with VHDL and loaded it onto an FPGA. That was fun and educational, but this is *so* much more. The memory management, wire wrapping, and microcode design are simply fantastic!!
I've been logging into magic-1.org about once a year for the past six or seven years. I play a few turns of advent, get a load of that sweet M.E.C.C. ASR33 teletype nostalgia, and log off. Today I showed my 9 and 10 year old kids, and they really got into advent. They begged me to teach them how to make a map. As always, I marvel at your ingenious TTL CPU, and drool over those blinkenlights. Thanks for this video. I feel my comprehension has doubled from say, 2% to 4%.
"4000 wires" Damn, you are a trooper sir XD
Whoa 33k views only? People are looking at the wrong stuff on RUclips. Truly breathtaking job, congratulations!
And here I am playing with my Rapsberry PI oblivious of all the underlaying micro electronics complications that this guy built by hand! Well done mate, well done.
Thank you for sharing this awesome experience of yours, I'm really in awe by what you created there.
I myself designed a 8-Bit CPU with a 4-Bit Adress Bus and thus a whopping 16 Byte of RAM integrated, all on a common Bus. I was able to run Fibonacci to 233, which basically was the most complicated programme to fit into 16 Bytes.
I'm at the verge of actually constructing this CPU out of TTL, mainly the 74HC series just for the sake of doing it.
Your work is very inspirational. Thanks again.
Kind regards,
Meta Custom Computers
How did your project go
So cool to see this video. Back around 2005 when I first got interested in building a computer from the ground up, and was wondering how practical such a thing would even be, your website was one of the first things I stumbled across. It, and the others on the webring were a wealth of information and inspiration. Thanks for sharing all this with us. Here's to 10 more years of Magic!
I've dropped in on the Magic 1 webpage from time to time over the years. Totally cool. I doff my hat to you Sir for some amazing and inspirational work. Keep it up :-)
That my friend his love and dedication to design this and make it happen is overwhelming. Thousands of hours of time spent. I couldn't do it, but I got a lot of respect for the person who did. I love Electronics. technology is based on more technology. But you have to understand the technology of the old days to appreciate the new technology of today and the future thank you for sharing us I can't believe you did it my biggest breadboard project was 2 ft by 2ft I can't imagine how big that is you've got sitting there in that box amazing
Fantastic! Congratulations to Magic-1 for running strong for 10 years (even if it needed a new PSU!).
Thanks for sharing your project Bill. It inspired mine to do my own, and while exams have put it off again and again for the past 6 years, I will finally be free to start it soon!
It's wonderful to get to know more about it, especially to get a talk through demo!
Awesome. Not only that you were able to produce working CPU, but also the dedication tht you put in to finish the project, and to write and maintain the software.
This is brilliant. I think we'd all love to hear more about computing in the 1970's and 1980's, if you have any spare time to make videos. Everything computers do these days seems so far removed from registers and memory addresses. We've come a long way, but I think it makes it much harder to understand exactly how the machine works on the fundamental level.
Most people cannot even fathom how an Electro-Mechanical Pinball machine works. But those are the building blocks of logic, memory, and such that made up what computers evolved from.
This is great! Just been playing adventure on here with my 6yo daughter in London. She was blown away that she was using a computer on the other side of the world (even though she technically does that every time she puts Netflix on) and we were both very impressed that you made it yourself.
I've known about Magic-1 for about 5 years or so and telnetted in a bunch of times (mostly to play Paranoia :) ), so this is a really fascinating video for me. Thanks for keeping the magic (and the Magic) alive, Bill!
I never had a chance to meet Magic-1 in person but I think I speak for many others when I say that it's been a great inspiration for the last 10 years! Thanks for posting this awesome video, and thanks for the Magic, Bill!
I'm totally filled with nostalgia now! Excellent and wonderful design, craftsmanship, and tutorial! Building your own computer architecture and writing the microcode and software. Then porting Tanenbaum's Minix... wow!
I just came up from my "lab" where I'm building a custom z80-based computer. Now I just want to go down to the lab and get back to work due to inspiration :)
I'm hoping to start something totally custom akin to Magic-1 eventually, but still have much to learn.
Nice work on this. It's absolutely inspiring.
If your serious about your comment, contact me about the architecture I'm coming up with. It's superscaler super computer. Do you want my phone number.
To all the gamers who "build their own PCs": putting cards in slots and screwing in a power supply is not building a PC, it's putting one together, THIS is building a PC.
No shit, Sherlock.
What is your point?
No, this is building a CPU with support devices to get a computer.
when you put together a house you are still building it u fuckin ass
Yes it is, that's building a computer, this is engineering a CPU and making it into a computer.
The most deserving person I have ever subscribed to. Amazingly informative video. I learned loads, and you kept me interested throughout the entire video. I usually get bored half way through long videos, was able to watch yours start to finish.
This is pretty impressive, protected process memory is pretty unique for a home brew machine, I can tell you have worked on some of the old minicomputers back in the day. Getting minix running on a home brew machine is also very impressive.
Wow that's impressive! You have an MMU and everything.
Thanks Bill - glad to finally get an in-depth tour. Much less hectic watching at home than trying to figure it all out at VCF.
Hi Bill, a really awesome project and very nicely presented in your video! I knew about your project but I did not realise you have this 10th anniversary video, which is very clear shows how far you've gone. In these types of projects often the software part doesn't the love and effort you've demonstrated here. Very cool that you ported Minix over. I once upon a time also played around with Minix, and wrote a hard disk driver for the IBM PS/2 Model 70 I had at the time, so I've scratched the surface. Great job!
I've watched this several times and Magic-1 never ceases to amaze me. It is a fantastic achievement, Bill. I wish I had the patience to see a project like this through to the end!
Hi Bill. Just after waking up, I found this nugget of gold on youtube.
Just want to thankyou for making my day, mate! I wish there was more of this type of content.
Off to your website now to feed my brain with the schematics ;)
It's still up and running! And it has Zork :D
Isn't it time for Magic-2 about now? :)
I think on his website he said that Magic-2 wouldn't happen, but there is a possibility that Magic-16 may happen.
I think magic one is good enough for coding because u has unlimited development for basic coding
The corrections on the website made me chuckle. Thanks for this video, it's rather inspirational. I'm still in the prototyping stage of my own computer. Making magnetic particles for the drum memory/NVRAM turned out quite tricky. And I think I will sacrifice the idea of only using pnp transistors for a lower power consumption.
I need to build something like this! I've tried to make a simple computer based on the Z80 microprocessor but I have never made a CPU from scratch, this really inspires me!
I love it!! This is awesome on many levels. Thank you for sharing it with us. I played around a little on the Telnet with it. Very cool! Boy, that adventure game brought back memories! Thanks again!
This project is amazing! I'm looking into what it would take for me to design build my own computer from discrete components, and seeing people that actually have achieved this is inspiring. Thank you for sharing!
Truly impressive! Great work Mr. Buzbee - thanks for sharing your work.
Fantastic video! It is cool to think about how your work helped make my OQO 01 possible!! I just wanted to thank you for your time in doing these videos! It is amazing work to follow and your enthusiasm is very evident! I particularly liked the instruction execution walk through.
I really love this! thanks for sharing and keeping it open, I'm studying Computer Engineering myself so naturally i find home brew computers really fascinating! also left you a message in the home dir. :)
Amazing! I'm going to have to read on your website about how you ported Minix to a custom minicomputer; I thought it was ia32-only! 😲 Well done!
Huge thumbs up! Great work, seems to run quite smoothly given the low clockrate.
Beautiful work! Ahhh I just love looking at wire wrapped boards. So strangely satisfying.
It would be so awesome to have a conversation with you... I can't imagine how was the process. You are just awesome!
Computer hardware designers, ranging from the norm to completely absorbed into the world of their creations.
Tremendous achievement! That was quite an effort, especially considering you had to write your own OS and programming languages, etc.
Just accessed it via telnet.
It was loads of fun. I had no clue what to do for a while but then I found my way.
Amazing work.
Brilliant! Love that you did the compiler and instruction set. It's the flashing leds that make me want to build a homebrew cpu to!!
i cannot fathom something this complex and huge
This is just amazing, greetings from Italy! I tried to write you a message on HiFromItaly in the guest home directory, but unfortunately I was lagging badly and after writing a couple of words into the file the system disconnected me... anyways, brilliant work here
The only at chip level programming I got involved with, was with PIC chips. Those are at low level, microchips that are close to what Rasberry Pi, or Arduino does today. Only those were tons less complex. So my accomplishment to the world was that we (me and my former employer, Colby, (RIP) were able to design our own 2-way radio repeater morse code ID and repeater controller. Most if it was timing loops, and forming a beep tone, in morse code. For what little it did, still took nearly a month of trial and error programming. It all fit on a one-off 3-inch square board, with a handful of parts. The engineering behind it all was to produce something that worked as good as a commercial unit that cost $200 or so, with a total cost of about $20.00. Due to the simplicity of the design, it just did not fail at any point over at least 3-4 years of use. Granted while we wrote it all using a Commodore 64 computer, but was simply that the DigiKey kit, was designed to run on that computer, and not that it ran on the C64 computer, but ran on the PIC chip.
Not bad for what little experience I had writing at the machine level. But really it turns out far easier to write things at the machine level than to have to figure out in the brain how to write it using C or Pascal, or whatever compiler you chose. But the PIC chips did use a very good structure, dedicated to the task. I think the entire program was well under 1K in size. 90 percent of it was table lookups and timing loops to get things. The rest being countdown loops, and controls to monitor traffic, and control the radio system it got interfaced to.
Thanks for this wonderful insight on your project.
I am interested in logic chips, and how cpus work i am going to build one even if it takes me ages. homebrew computers are where pcs sprang from and wanting to have a deeper understanding of things is human nature.
"Yo this guy built his own CPU."
"You mean PSU?"
JESUS.
Sorry Bill, I think I just killed your ultimate machine. :) I ran some Basic code which supposed to draw a circle but couldn't stop the execution doing so from Android telnet client which didn't have ctrl+c/break key combination in standard Android keyboard obviously. Now, telnet server seems to be completely dead. I hope Magic-1 is OK and didn't catch fire. :)
Most computers of that era, kept stability as the major reason they will survive to the end of time.
Is this why I can't connect :(
I connected last night Ben (26/07/18)...
Wow..you took me back to my childhood electronic computer building days :) Now how many today would know how to to even write a program in Hexa code :)
We (a small team) did programming of a TI 960 back in the 1980's into the 90
s ... it provided front panel access to machine resources too ... learned quite a bit from that exercise ... later I did a wire-wrap Z80 and used an early HP logic analyzer to debug 256 byte deep pieces of program code ... compilation, of course, done on a 386-based PC in the 90's ...
What a great project! I was hoping that you'd explain microcode (what's in those PROMS?)
Update: I just went to your site. It's all there!
Super inspirational! I'm in the process of designing my own computer, I will use either a 6502 or Z80. But it's just great to see this made of low level ICs and the wire wrapping looks almost insane.
The first, last, and only TTL-based CPU I ever played with was the Wang 2200 minicomputer, and this was back in the late '70s / early '80s. My Dad owned two of them for his business. It was the first computer I ever learned to program on. Wang Basic. :-)
Ten years ago when this video was new youtube recommended it to me and i was fascinated about the whole concept of building a computer from scratch. Not the first video or project that pushed me to that direction. But one of the first. Now ten years later still. RUclips pushes it into my recommendations and. Dang it's an amazing project i really want to build one something like that myself. But. Eh. Chronic prograstination. In these ten years between, i have learned assembly and a lot of soldering but haven't done anything to start my own TTL computer. Maybe some day. Not now either, got some problems programming my quadruped robo thingy. But if i get the time and energy.
Really coherent explanation of your computer. Enjoyed the entire video!
It is a really amazing work Bill. When I saw the net of wires on the back of the boards I said "No, it's not possible!" hahahah. You are a Myth!
Just great !, You have done all the nittygritty, a huge thumbs up !
Bit of trivia, TTL is short for Transistor Transistor Logic, each of the logic gates used to build all the circuits in the TTL CPU are built using Transistors that are inside TTL integrated circuits, originally TTL circuitry was built using discrete Transistors before integrated circuits were invented.
Man, you're great! I've built my homebrew computers and was very proud of them.... until I saw THIS :)
This is so interesting. It also puts how little I know into perspective.
Cool! I always toyed with the idea of doing one, but due to time and cost.... Glad to see someone did!
In the video, you don't actually show the ALU board. What are you using? Chained 74181 chips?
I was surprised to find some of the classic games there too. BSD Backgammon, and I swear that's the old DECUS RSTS/E BASIC Plus 2 Star Trek that I used to play on a PDP-11/44 after school.
Thanks for making this available for everyone!
PS: The session kept crashing and disconnecting. I left a text file to inform you. After reading here below though, might have been some jerk portscanning or something.
For the ALU I'm using a variant of the 74181 - the 74F381/2. Basically the same functionality, but in a 20-pin package. And yes, chained along with a 74F182 fast carry lookahead. The ALU lives on the "Register Card" - which is the most dense and last one I show in the video.
Sorry about the session getting dropped. I suspect a bug in the device driver I wrote for the Wiznet ethernet interface. It does seem to happen more frequently when Magic-1 is getting pounded on by scripts.
I wish Transmeta's Crusoe would have survived. I was in high school at the time and was fascinated with non-intel CPUs :-)
VERY cool.
You, Sir, are a Boss, in my humble opinion.
Thank you very much for the description and sharing.
Really impressive work! thanks for sharing.
I find wire wrap to be a thing of beauty. I just wish the sockets and boards weren't so darn expensive. It's cheaper to have a PCB made overseas. But wrapping is just so satisfying.
What I missed seeing here was an AM radio tuned up. I used to use one with the Altair 8800 and MITS 8080, for example, to "hear" my programs. Very easy to tell if it crashed that way!! And also to listen to where the code is at, from time to time. Many folks wrote "music" programs which would play tones on the AM radio, too! Would be nice to let others see how that works.
Did you get the wire wrap boards for this from new-old-stock?
Sadly nobody seems to make them anymore, and vintage NOS is insanely priced on fleabay :(
I got very lucky with the boards. Found a stack of them at an electronics surplus store (15 years ago).
Bill Buzbee
Thanks for the reply!
I should check the old local mom'n'pop place, now that you mention it
People may call wire wrapping obsolete, but it's so cool, "easy" and useful
Sory 4 my inglish- I drove through a black lives matter event yesterday...
LMAO! Awesome computer, even looks tidy and neat. Love it. I remember the game rouge. That was incredulous... Love your device there sir. Good work.
Whenever you flip a switch on that thing it will feel like you are doing something very important
I worked on the Univac 1219B, an 18-bit transistor computer, in the Navy. We programmed it by poking bits into the instruction register three at a time with three fingers (six octal values total) then pressing another switch to advance the program counter.
One of our local high schools in the 80s had the old Altair 8080 with 4K of ram, which is as close as you go to what this is, but this CPU is by far more advanced than that was. They had TTY unit, and paper tape reader writer. And it had form fed paper, as a display. That was the most basic computer system I had ever seen at the time.
"linux, which most people are familiar with" my parents: That's Where You're Wrong, Kiddo
Couldn't get to the server per se. But it seems you got it to work for what you wanted it to do. If I were to take up the same I would have created a 32-bit processor as close as I could to a DEC VAX 11/785. OS wise I would have to create that from scratch as I wouldn't want Windows, UNIX, OS2 or whatever. I would try to recreate the PC version of VMS that I wrote back in the 80's. Really that was why I was writing it so I could test it out before investing time and effort in creating the processor. The DEC version at the time was 31 boards for the processor, 6 -8 if I remember right for memory. Then you have the mass bus and unibus with about 6-8 cards. These days, I think most of it could be compressed into a FPGA chips to reduce the seer number of boards. Just wished I had the schematics I had at the time.
Hey! I really enjoyed watching your video! It was so interesting to listen your life and interest in technology! Are you still making more videos?
If I get a "cannot connect", on both port 23 and port 51515, does that mean it's simply busy with someone else connected, or that it's down? :/
Excellent work Bill!
Wow, you did an amazing job. I cant built hardware.. I only did some programming in 6502 on Atari. Respect to Bill.
Wow, using it from my computer (via telnet) is so trippy! Very cool!
I love it! I will definitely try and log into it at some point!
I haven't played Adventure in YEARS! :) And I have tomorrow off :)
Way cool project!
i made it all tot the end of the video, i was really impressed how you have build it. i would love tot learn more about desinging and building something like this where van i find the best information with considiration i have absolutely zero experience
sorry for my englisch if it is hard to understand i am too still leurning that
+jonathan beibier
Jonathan, check out the "links" page at my project website - homebrewcpu.com. I list the books and other material that taught me how to do this project. And, note that I had little electronics experience before I started the project (I'm a software guy). It's actually not that difficult - just a state machine.
Amazing and very inspirational. Thanks for sharing.
Happy birthday to Magic-1
Absolutely Awesome. I'd love to see another video about the Magic-1. What project are you working on now?
This is very impressive