asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ...to reconstruct the universe of people who made and played those, and their thoughts << here i am, lol
asciilifeform: you get, more or less, an early '60s mainframe..
asciilifeform: jurov: z80 is closer to teletype than to any modern cpu << again nope. here's a suggested exercise for everyone: take the z80 (find a die shot or whatever) and zoom it out to make the transistors discrete. how much physical space will this occupy? how many tonnes of copper wire? how many hundreds kWatt of power used? for chillers?
asciilifeform: it isn't a question of 'takes longer', but of simply-never-happens
asciilifeform: jurov: ... say it takes 10 cycles per average instruction, at 8MHz, ecdsa is about 500k steps << memory is by far the more merciless constraint
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: ... making something like a z80, as long as it can be made at home, with equipment costing about what a z80 cost << absolutely. but it is important to understand that a z80 (or even intel 4004) is far, far closer to the 'pentium' than to anything that has ever been built entirely at home from discretes
asciilifeform: you can't draw a circuit on a sheet of copper with nonconductive glue either...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you could use a conductor with dielectric masks << l0l!! not invertible, think for halfaminute
asciilifeform: pay same, get half, then half again...
asciilifeform: which eventually ended up with 2MB in which no linux of the time would sit down
asciilifeform: incidentally, the ram penny-pinching ought to be familiar to veterans of the old linksys wrt linux router
asciilifeform: i think the purple logo won't boot off an SD << when this is through there will be no need to boot from anything but the internal eeprom
asciilifeform: yep but it has twice the memory << unfortunately, not so simple. the -previous generation- of both devices cost the same and had 2x the ram. they are no longer available new anywhere i know of
asciilifeform: the pogoplug MOBILE (blue logo) does NOT accept SATA << correct. costs ~$6 less
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: the 'bury brigade' is slacking today...
asciilifeform: legend also has it that one of the items secretly salvaged by h. hughes's 'glomar explorer' mega-ship was a collection of such circuits
asciilifeform: out of uncommonly small physically-discrete transistors
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: before i fall asleep, i remembered to tell, that there actually were 'integrated circuits' in ussr that were built in the way you suggest☟︎
asciilifeform: that it was not deemed economical to use jewelled bearing, as americans did, and the oil of a certain inedible bean (forget which) was employed as lubricant
