The megaprocessor

Abstract

In James Newman's living room is a monument to our kind of crazy. Seven 2-meter-tall panels are covered with circuit boards festooned with blinking lights. It is a complete working CPU, plus 256 bytes of RAM and an input/output interface, all built out of 42,300 hand-soldered discrete transistors. It took Newman some four years and roughly &#a3;40,000 sterling (about US $52,500) to build and design the so-called Megaprocessor in his home in Cambridge, England. In some absinthe-tinged sense, the project is the logical end point of his software writing career. Newman explains that, over the years, he found himself doing increasingly low-level programming, and so became more and more interested in the underlying hardware. He says he began working on the Megaprocessor because he wanted to build a processor to see how a real one worked.