homebrew 'puter project (was: 8008?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 11/16/2005 at 11:54 AM Roger Merchberger wrote:

>Originally I was going to design and build my own buss structure / 
>backplane ( I was thinking 80 pins - 40-pin IDE headers are bog-easy to 
>find... ;-) something that could expand to a 16-bit CPU....
>
>First card would be a fully buffered CPU, next card might be 256K or 512K 
>RAM, 3rd card might be a small LED/LCD display (2x40 or somesuch) and of 
>course, one card full'o'blinkinlights... ;-)

Why have a backplane at all?  That much RAM is what, one or maybe two
chips?

Better than a backplane/bus, why not just a good I/O connection?  A nice
serial hookup maybe? 

More than fast enough for blinking lights and LCD displays.  Why burden the
CPU-to-memory datapath with yucky bus interface hardware?

Cheers,
Chuck