11–20 of 56 posts
The first time I built a computer from scratch using TTL components was in 1978 for my senior project. I have repeated the effort a couple of times on FPGA's. If you have never tried building your own computer from scratch, you should, it is a great learning experience and also, kind of a lot of fun, I guess if you are a geek which a lot of us on HN are :)
This series is truly excellent. Ben Eater is a brilliant teacher, and I wish I have has this series growing up - I think I'd be in hardware/electronics now... at the very least, I would have wasted a lot of time tinkering with making my own stuff! I followed along with the clock module and when I was done I had a Matrix style "I know kungfu" moment - it all was crystal clear. And the series doesn't brush over importa…
It’s such an accessible hobby thanks to the abundance of online information/ideas, cheap components, and simple tools. Plus you learn so much even with the most basic of projects, and considering how much our world now depends on electronics and technology, I think it’s practically useful as well as simply entertaining to learn this stuff.
"You need to enable JavaScript to view this site." I was expecting an interactive 8-bit computer simulation webapp, but all I got was something that could've been several pages on a static site. More disappointingly, it apparently requires a very "modern" browser to view :-( In my experience, to see this sort of anti-accessibility from someone who knows the "low-level" enough to build CPUs successfully is unusual, bu…
Ben Eater is without a doubt in my top 10 youtubers. His videos are so in-depth and explained in such a great way that I come away learning huge amounts every time he posts. I’m sure a lot of this stuff is basic to people here, but to a software guy, I’ve found his channel invaluable for understanding how computers work at an electronics level and also just wildly fascinating.
"You need to enable JavaScript to view this site." I was expecting an interactive 8-bit computer simulation webapp, but all I got was something that could've been several pages on a static site. More disappointingly, it apparently requires a very "modern" browser to view :-( In my experience, to see this sort of anti-accessibility from someone who knows the "low-level" enough to build CPUs successfully is unusual, bu…
Another great resource is NAND to Tetris (currently auditable on Coursera for free): https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2
Here's the first video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnzuMJLZRdU