6502 chip

[Roger Heflin]

I disassembled a TTL computer that was sometime around 1974 built.

It had 4 - 74181 (4 bit very simple slice proceeor) at its center and a
massive pile of 74 and 74H series logic around it.  The cooling fan for it
used almost as much power as some of the desktop systems we have today (55W),
the power for the entire computer (very simple computer) was I believe about
1500W, it generated alot of heat, and it was big, bulky, and probably a very
simple computer that was not really useable to run a car or really anything
else very complicated.  I think the whole computer unit probably weighted 200
lbs as was probably on the same calibar as a 6502 or 68HC11 speed wise.
I seem to remeber that it had 16k (an entire board the size of todays
motherboards, completely stuffed with memory chips, and addressing logic).

It was not really something that would be useable for EFI, especially since
the chips that made up the cpu board proabably cost $1+ each, and there
were several hundred, maybe into the low thousands that made up what would
probably have been an equivalent to the <1Mhz processors that easily fit
on a single chip now.

				Roger

On Thu, 1 Oct 1998, Mike Dillon wrote:

> 
> I am not sure but I think the only "chips" commonly around in the 
> late 60's were DTL, I think TTL was early 70's and therefore would 
> not have been avalible for the Apollo program. "Processors" were 
> purpose built at that time (and not all digital). They only included
> those functions in each computer, that were need for that computer
> to complete its mission nothing more.
> Digital Logic was very expencive and used lots of power so any computer(s) on 
> the apollo spacecraft, (Even the shuttle, but they may have upgraded it)
> would have been special built for the specifc job it was to do, and even
> by the standards of the 6502 would have been slow, used lots of power,
> had very little program-data space and not very adaptable to any other 
> use. The Military and NASA was the driving force in the early years of 
> the semiconductor industry, as they wanted to reduce the power used 
> and weight of the rocket guidence systems, they were building crude
> guidence (by todays standards) computers with lots of transistors and
> passiive compents. Russia just built bigger rockets.   
> Alot was done using analog computers they used fewer transistors for
> a given task (Look at the early EFI "computers") but were not very 
> adaptable to other functions.
> 
> Mike D.
> 
>