So, I made a thing. A really big thing. Really big and really crazy.
You might have seen my discrete 555 and 741 IC electronics kits. Well, a while back I had this idea about creating a discrete version of a microprocessor, but it just sounded too difficult, time consuming, or impractical. And part of me didn’t want to do it, because it just sounds so tedious to design–at every stage, I was secretly hoping to find a show-stopping problem. But part of me was really interested to see if it could be done.
At dinner, Windell and I went through a thought experiment to see if it would even be possible. We weren’t sure how many transistors were in a 6502 (more than 1,000 but less than 10,000). If four surface mount transistors can fit in a square centimeter, then the board would need to be about 1,000 square centimeters, or about 32cm (13in) on a side, which is not as huge as we originally thought. Darn it, time to investigate further!
