BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
I'm not so sure about that. Reading about computer hardware and actually designing and building computer hardware are hardly in the same league. Saying otherwise is akin to asserting that "making music is easy: just play the right notes at the right time." To use yet another analogy, one can study all the cookbooks in print, yet still be unable to prepare a tasty and nourishing meal because s/he lacks the "chops" required to do so.
When I went to school back in the days when we filled out our slates by candle light in the snow and were grateful for it, the engineering students actually had to build things. In our CS Logic class where we talked gates, flips flops and Karnaugh maps (ha! spelled that right the first time...), we were tasked with building a 4 Bit ALU. That was the Computer Science curriculum, not the EE or CE. They did a lot more with hard parts over there than we did.
I don't know what they do today. Maybe it's all VERILOG in simulators, but I assume they still do some wire to pin work. But to be fair, many of the senior term student projects from the Information Tech program (I think it's called) over here at UC Irvine, when they used hardware at all, it was certainly at the assembled modules level of "camera or sensors plugged in to laptop" level of hardware integration. Understandable since this is mostly a software based curriculum.
BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
And if you want to be able to point to something and say "I created this." scratch-building an SBC is the only real route. Everything else is mere assembly. You can't rightfully say you built your own home if you didn't do the architectural work, frame it, lay brick, etc.
That's right, but that wasn't my goal in getting my home either. However despite not designing, framing, bricking, or wiring it, I get to live comfortably in it, invite folks over to it, paint the walls colors I like, nail pictures in to said walls, and keep my possessions and pets mostly safe from harm.
The point simply being that computer circuit design is no longer a requirement for the vast majority of use cases that people may want to use a computer for, including modern hardware integration.
I mean, look at this thing:
http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?cat=25A "smart terminal" made from a PC keyboard and a VGA monitor. Components: 3 Chips, a (very sophisticated) micro controller, an EPROM and a RS-232 chip. This was not a hardware problem, this was a software problem. I can't say, but for all I know most of the "hardware design" of this came off of the application notes. (And I'm not trying to disparage the designers skills here.)
Could I have done something like this via paint by number integration of app notes (modulo the software complexity)? Maybe. Would I have had the confidence to try it? Certainly not. But others do, other are doing so today with little training outside of perhaps youtube videos and blog posts.
So, yea, if you want the satisfaction of building a computer from the chip level, a 6502 project would be ideal. It is interesting to me. If your goal is something else, some other integration or design project, it's not necessary, not anymore.
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. I wanted to do some low level programming and such, and decided to do so by creating my own emulator and assembler.