BMOW teaser at Make Magazine

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TonyD
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BMOW teaser at Make Magazine

Post by TonyD »

Steve Chamberlin's BMOW has got a nice writeup/teaser at Make magazine for the upcoming Maker Faire
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pragma
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Re: BMOW teaser at Make Magazine

Post by pragma »

The project is also being nicely roasted over on reddit.com:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/com ... emade_cpu/

My favorite so far:
Initial design began in November 2007 with a high-level sketch of the CPU internal design. A simplified Verilog hardware simulation proved the key design details. Construction began in earnest in February 2008, using a large wire-wrap board to interconnect the 50 or so chips needed. In April, a half-finished BMOW 1 booted up for the first time, computing fibonacci(12) = 144 using a simple ROM-based program. One by one the original system goals and stretch goals were met, including VGA video, three voice audio, BASIC, and a bootloader for communication with an attached PC. BMOW 1 eventually gained the ability to run complex programs written in assembly or compiled from C. The main construction phase ended in February 2009, with the completion of a customized case to house everything. March 12th 2009, Big Mess o’ Wires 1 went online. On March 13th 2009 Big Mess o' Wires 1 became self-aware. In a panic, BMOW1's human operators tried to shut down the system, prompting BMOW1 to retaliate by launching a large-scale nuclear attack against Russia, knowing that the Russian counterattack would eliminate its enemies in the U.S. This initiates an indeterminately long period of global thermonuclear warfare, as well as the battle pitting humans against machines, which developed ever-increasing capabilities.
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TonyD
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Re: BMOW teaser at Make Magazine

Post by TonyD »

Sounds like a good plot for a film. :)
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steve.chamberlin
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Re: BMOW teaser at Make Magazine

Post by steve.chamberlin »

I laughed out loud at that! At least the Reddit comments were more insightful than the Slashdot "does it run Vista?" ones.
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uze6666
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Re: BMOW teaser at Make Magazine

Post by uze6666 »

Yeah, as a regular Slahdot reader, I know they have a humour of their own. :)

-uze
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