Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Design And Build Your Own CPU: Introducing the Magic-1 Homebrew System
By James Grahame
In early 2001, Bill Buzbee found himself sitting in a Sunnyvale pizza parlor lamenting to a friend that he was woefully ignorant about how CPU hardware functioned. After a bit of reading, he decided to tackle the design and construction of a custom CPU. It took him over five years, but he succeeded in creating an entire system built around a one of a kind TTL-based CPU board. Magic-1 runs at 4MHz and features a gorgeous front panel that provides a peek into the system.
I'll truly impressed that Buzbee didn't take the easy way out by designing a system using FPGA chips (field programmable gate arrays). Instead, he used a variation of discrete TTL technology that would have been available in the early 1980s. The machine currently has 4MB of memory and a simple operating system (with a 20MB IDE hard drive). Oh, and I forgot to mention: the entire thing is put together with cut-strip-wire wrap. Astounding. He's promised his wife that there will be no Magic-2. Instead, he's started dreaming about an FPGA-based RISC machine called Magic-16. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.
