I built cpu in an computer architecture class and it was one of the most useful things I have ever done, in terms of information learned. It was of course extremely limited (4 bit, so only 16 instructions, 16 type of instructions, 64 bytes of ram, only output was 4 leds for the single register, etc) but a great experience.

In my university (HU Berlin) this is part of the normal computer science curriculum in the 2nd or 3rd semester.

And I fully agree, this is really interesting and you get a much deeper understanding of a computer's internals.

What topics did you guys cover (in class)?

we started at the transistor level, building AND/OR gates. Then XOR/NAND etc, then a simple ALU (using real nand/and/or etc chips) then a simple register, etc all the way up, each step getting an integrated chip to replace what we had built with smaller components in the previous step.

For anyone whose interested in this sort of thing I highly recommend The Elements of Computing Systems (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/).

-I'm buying a laptop.

-Pah, a laptop? You want a desktop.

-Buying??? A real man builds a desktop.

-Builds it? Anyone worth anything builds from barebones.

-Barebones is for n00bs. I hand solder the whole thing together.

-Hand solder? You soft shite, I use a blacksmith's forge and a hot piece of iron.

-A hot piece of iron? I should be so lucky - I'm going back to basics and not using fire. I'm just bashing rocks together to get them the right shape.

(still, awesome achievement)

A hot piece of iron? Luxury. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt. </python>

This my friends, is hacking.

This guy worked on Froyo's JIT.

He once built his own computer, out of nothing but TTL...

A picture should now appear with him surrounded by beautiful women and Dos Equis. (Then Chuck Norris happens by, pauses, shakes his head, and mutters "Damn, that's cool.")

> It serves web pages at http://www.magic-1.org

Except when it's getting slammed by every person reading HN on a Friday night, apparently.

It's funny that a guy who built his computer from scratch used Microsoft FrontPage to build the website for it.

Theory A: he was too busy with hardware to waste his time writing a website any other way

Theory B: he doesn't know much about or care about learning how to make web pages- he is into hardware.

Suggesting this guy is lazy shows a deep lack of understanding of the work done making his own computer while juggling a wife and kids.

Let's try not to kill the computer by visiting webpages it serves all at once :)

This is old, isn't it?