Post by Dan SimperI want my own ENIAC in my garage, because an ENIAC is COOL !!!
What do I need ?
You might consider one of the FPGA (field programmable gate array)
development boards. These little boards, and often the software
tools that come with them, provide you with a chip containing tens
of thousands or even millions of bits of logic that you can connect
up for whatever purposes you desire.
A handful of different people have used these to create CPU's.
Circuit Cellar magazine had an article describing one of these.
My personal preference would be to implement a Burroughs 5500
mainframe and get Algol running on it again. With a little work
you could interface to a one or two SDRAM dimms and have yourself
"silicon tape drives." The combination would likely run at
thousands of times the speed of the original machines.
And it could fit inside a kitchen match box.
There is an outfit in Australlia selling a development system
for a few hundred dollars.