radio electronics article
- BUILD THE MARK 8 - Radio Electronics July 1974 (classiccmp.org)
The Radio-Electronics Mark-8 Mini-computer is a complete microcomputer which may be used for a number of purposes, including data acquisition, data manipulation and control of experiments. It may also be used to send data to a larger computer or to a terminal such as the Radio-Electronics TV Typewriter, (September 1973) and it is easily interfaced with a keyboard. The keyboards do not have to be ASCII encoded since the microcomputer itself can convert the input code to an equivalent ASCII code for output. This Minicomputer is not a glorified calculator and it is not intended just for educational use. It can be interfaced to a calculator (a possible future project if readers are interested) to perform complex mathematical routines, and it may also be used as a teaching tool.
- Analyzing the vintage 8008 processor from die photos: its unusual counters (righto.com)
The revolutionary Intel 8008 microprocessor is 45 years old today (March 13, 2017), so I figured it’s time for a blog post on reverse-engineering its internal circuits. One of the interesting things about old computers is how they implemented things in unexpected ways, and the 8008 is no exception. Compared to modern architectures, one unusual feature of the 8008 is it had an on-chip stack for subroutine calls, rather than storing the stack in RAM. And instead of using normal binary counters for the stack, the 8008 saved a few gates by using shift-register counters that generated pseudo-random values. In this article, I reverse-engineer these circuits from die photos and explain how they work.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-8
- Mark-8 (Wikipedia)
The Mark-8 is a microcomputer design from 1974, based on the Intel 8008 CPU (which was the world’s first 8-bit microprocessor). The Mark-8 was designed by Jonathan Titus, a Virginia Tech graduate student in chemistry. After building the machine, Titus decided to share its design with the community and reached out to Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics. He was turned down by Popular Electronics, but Radio-Electronics was interested and announced the Mark-8 as a ’loose kit’ in the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine.