Those not frequenting the other fora might not have seen this :
I am in the process of recreating the ETH Lilith, Niklaus Wirth’s 1980’s AMD2901 based Modula-2 workstation. Actual CPU design was by Richard Oran / Utah, several subsystems were implemented by various PHD students.
The Lilith was following the Xerox Alto, which Wirth wanted, but couldn’t, buy for the ETH.
My redesign closely follows the original, with subsystem altered to bypass old bottlenecks.
New PCB’s have been redesigned to bypass the need for gold-plated PCB edgeconnectors, and to reduce size somewhat.
The CPU remains the same, memory uses more recent DRAM chips to reduce the number of RAM boards from 4 to 1, IO has been renewed, with an ATA/IDE-based flashdisk and PS2 based keyboard and mouse.
One PCB set has been assembled, the DPU, a 6802 based debugging unit, is up and running.
How much will the finished retro design cost?
Very nice to see real hardware, rather than a Pie emulation.
I remember reading about great new products like Modula-2 in BYTE,
and never hearing about them in later years.
Mind you I still need to get it running…
Should CHM ever want to get theirs operational I have recreated the debugging board that the ETH used to debug their prototypes.
