In the summer of 1966 I was working at the Rome (NY) Air Development Center, on a Univac 1218 computer (a militarized verson of the 418). It was an 18 bit ones-complement machine. On the console were two banks of lights each in a 6 x 3 format. The machine had a primitive time sharing system, and the lights on the console normally displayed a pattern which was I L (for idle loop). I found out where the pattern was stored and one day I changed it to read FU. The Univac engineer came in, saw it, and said "things aren't that bad, arey they?". I just stared at him, and he said, well, I guess they are. On Sun, Apr 8, 2018 at 10:11 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

Robert Baruch is building a 32-bit RISC-V processor out of 3.3v MSI logic chips.

This cool video describes his circuit board for a single 32-bit register (out of 32 such registers) of this modern RISC architecture. He uses two standard PCIE-style busses & connectors for his sink + 2 source busses.

In 1950's/1960's style, the register comes with its own set of LED blinking lights! (BTW, the LED's cost more and take substantially more power than the register itself.)

For the cognescenti: I find it curious that he built a full 32-bit register board instead of a *bit slice* of the entire register-cum-ALU a la the PDP-8 or the old AMD bit-slice chips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLs_NRwu1Y4

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