An FPGA-based LGP-30 Replica

An FPGA-based LGP-30 Replica The LGP-30 was a commercial computer, released in 1956. Due to its simple design and relatively low cost, it may be seen as the first “personal computer” – to be used by a single user as their “desk computer”. (It could sit by your desk, and was the size of a desk too.) Designed in the age of vacuum tubes, it needed only 113 tubes in total, of which only 24 were used in the CPU itself! This simplicity was achieved by a bit-serial CPU design, which was tightly integrated with the magnetic drum storage unit. The magnetic drum contained not only the main memory, but also the CPU’s three 32-bit registers, and several tracks with timing signals to control the instruction decoding and execution. This page describes a replica that is true to the bit-serial implementation and its timing, but uses modern components. The CPU and the magnetic drum storage are recreated in an FPGA – by implementing the complete logic equations published by the LGP-30’s inventor (in ... Read full article.