The BREDSAC Project

Electronic Dynamic Storage Breadboard Computer

by Gregory Ewing
greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing

What possessed me to do this?

Inspiration for this project came from two sources.

One is the effort underway at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park to build a replica of the EDSAC, one of the earliest stored-program computers, built at Cambridge University in the late 1940s.

EDSAC Replica Project

The other is a series of videos by Ben Eater about the construction of a simple computer on breadboards from 74 series logic chips.

Ben Eater's 8-bit Computer

Put these two things together, add in a hankering to do something with hardware and a pile of parts burning a hole in the bottom of my junk box, and the conclusion is obvious. I need to build a breadboard implementation of the EDSAC!

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