I built my own computer. by hand.

PC builders when they realize their cpu is pre-built

Watch him heat large amounts of quartz sand to produce his own silicon.

4. The ALU could have been replaced by a single chip My guy, the entire computer can be replaced by a single chip. I think, implementing the ALU yourself is a big part of the achievement and fun.

The complexity of this project really puts how unbelievably amazing everyday computers are in to perspective.

There are only two more ways I see to go lower-level: Using pure transistors and then making transistors.

Man went from having programmers as main audience to having electrical engineers as main audience

I remember my brother built a binary/octal/decimal/hexadecimal converting computer using ic’s hand wrapped on perf board when he was an 8th grader because he got into an argument with his math teacher over letters being numbers (hex) and not just as a variable. It took him a week to design, and 2-months to build, he took 2nd place at the regional science fair (losing to a bubble memory demo the kid’s dad brought in from his work) My brother used switches to cycle through the modes and lamps to show the converted binary and red digital displays for the hex numbers. There was a keypad to enter the base 10 number to convert. The 80’s were a great time to be a kid. I thought it was cool.

hey jdh ive been here since around 5-10k and you're a huge inspiration to me. thanks so much for posing, stay safe!

Bet if he got to an interview and showed his projects, they would still say "that's cool, but can you reverse this binary tree?"

I'm impressed you can keep track of anything through that jungle of wires. And that you managed to connect everything without wires jumping out and loose connections and everything. But honestly, I'm impressed you made this work. Good job.

Congratz :D And on learning from the not so great design choices. I'd love to see you build a sound card on the breadboards next as in like the 8 bit sound chips, but in discrete logic/component form. Would prob be complicated, but I haven't seen anyone do it before.

Such an amazing accomplishment. I bet you learned SO MUCH too!!

This seems like one of those 2am video ideas where you completely ignore the difficulty and only focus on how awesome it would be to pull it off. Absolutely insane man. Great job.

Having literally just finished my computer architecture course at university yesterday, it was really nice being able to actually understand some of the things you're talking about in this video lol.

We built breadboard computers like this in high school (mid-80's). We were put into groups of 3-4 people, given the schematic, BOM and told to go build it. The design used a 74181 as the brains. We didn't have a display and all we had for output were LEDs and 7-segment displays. LCD? LOL. FWIW this was a few years before VGA was even a thing. I don't think any group actually got the whole thing to work but some groups got some sub-systems to work.

Thanks for the chill background music. It really helped because this video gave me anxiety.

Ben Eater be like: well-done comrade

Congratulations! And special congratulations for your poor design decisions. Doing the wrong thing, and then realizing why it was wrong is the one of the most important elements of projects like this.

Wow. This is amazing man. Great job on this!

I started something similar a few years ago. I only used ICs when I'd already built the equivalent with transistors - so an IC with 8 AND gates could only be used once I'd built a few AND gates without ICs. Started from limited electronics knowledge and got as far as having a circuit producing the Fibonacci sequence with LEDs displaying memory content. So at that point I had basic memory handling and felt I understood everything I needed to do to get a working computer but gave up at the point of defining an instruction set. The initial aim was to achieve that level of understanding so I wasn't convinced I wanted to keep adding breadboards having achieved my aim. So your collected mass of breadboards brought back memories. I think this is a great thing to have a go at for anyone with enough interest; even if you don't take it all the way.