This project is a revised version of my previous DWMC-16 project, which has become deprecated, though will used to inform my decisions for the project.
The reason for this project is pretty simple.
I want to build my own 16 bit minicomputer.
Most of this is thanks to watching too many videos by Usagi Electric, with his tube based 1 Bit Computer, or his series about the Centurion Minicomputer. Another reason is my interest in computing history and the books that I read recently, about the early times of computing and the authors waxing poetically about the likes of Whirlwind, the TX-0 or the PDP-1 and PDP-8…
As such, I will endeavour to work on this project and follow through with it, especially considering the confused way I’ve gone at it previously. Setting unrealistic design goals, jumping straight into ALU design, revising the design goals, creating a DTL 16 bit register, failing to design a back plane for multiple of those registers, writing and revising the Instruction Set eight times…
This time around, I will begin with a design document that might be subject to revisions, but I will try to come up with some solid work there. And the following posts will, for now, be straight up what I write down into the LaTeX set document that will provide the base of by work on the DWMC-16.
Already, I have set up a new gitlab repository for the DWMC-16 Hardware.
Any hardware developed for this project is open source under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 – Permissive CERN-OHL-P-2.0+.
Any software developed for this project is open source under the European Union Public License, version 1.2 EUPL-1.2+.
Both licenses are approved by the Open Source Initiative.