[sdiy] OT: COSMAC Elf 2000

[anthony]

A while back I saw an article in Nuts & Volts magazine about the COSMAC Elf 
2000. At first I read the project article avidly, hoping for a cool project 
that might consume a lion's share of my vast TTL logic collection. Then I 
get to the part where it says a lot of the logic was replaced for our 
circuit building convenience by a PAL or two. So then I was totally soured 
onthe Elf 2000. This was one of the things I HATED about projects in 
Radio-Electronics: they'd hook you in with a cool sounding project and then 
you'd find it was centered around some wonderful new VLSI chip that my 
paper-route-having teenage ass couldn't afford. It was like they couldn't 
think up a lot of decent projects for kids like me who had scrounged a lot 
of parts from old radios & TV's. Of course the solution was to go to the 
local library (Logansport, Indiana at that time) and bug the basement clerks 
for all of their back issues of Radio-Electronics & Popular Electronics. My 
father had several of the latter and in the late 70's, they really knew how 
to put a few cool easy to build projects in their pages. I think my problem 
was I was buying RE from the period 1985-1989 (and later for a spell in the 
90's when I was no longer a teenager).

So the point of this messge: I thought about it and figured I could probably 
make an Altair clone for cheaper than an Elf 2000 or even the original 
COSMAC Elf. I have all sorts of 74LS373's and 74LS374's and a few 8088's. I 
know that the original Altair was based on an 8086, but the switch shouldn't 
be too hard.

It would be cool if I had some hex display Nixies (all mine are decimal), 
but a huge LED array and an army of 7-segment displays should work fine.