PopTech : Blog : Reality bytes: Digital archeologists recreate computer chips of the past

Reality bytes: Digital archeologists recreate computer chips of the past

Lindsay Borthwick ( Bio / Posts ) | Monday, July 25, 2011 UTC

The Digital Revolution has transformed the way we record our lives. But, ironically, some of the very first examples of the technology at the heart of that transformation—the computer chip—are today a mystery, lost to history. At least they were, until Greg James, Barry Silverman and Brian Silverman, three “digital archaeologists” came along. In their free time, they’re trying to preserve, study and document historic computers.

Their Stonehenge is the MOS6502 processor, the chip that became the heart of some of the first home computers, including the Apple I and II, Commodore PET, Atari, and the Nintendo game console. It was designed in 1975 the old-fashioned way: by hand, on a drafting board. The original schematic has been lost, and until recently our knowledge of how it was created and our understanding of how it functioned were gone with it.

An article in the July/August issue of Archaeology magazine details how James, Silverman and Silverman “excavated” 6502, built a kaleidoscopic simulation of the chip at work, which resides on their website Visual6502.org, and eventually reverse-engineered it. It even runs some of the classic videogames you used to play in your family’s rec room.

But this isn’t about a bunch of gamers trying to relive their youth. Barry Silverman explains:

“The 6502 is the last of that generation where processor manufacturing was a work of art. In artifact terms, you might have a lot of examples of a particular piece of pottery, but the way it was created is gone.”

MOS6502’s design would have been simple by today’s standards and drawn on a single sheet of paper about the size of a desk. Thirty-five years later, microprocessors are designed by enormous teams of engineers working on computers, and their work is constantly being archived digitally. The hardware is also vastly more complex. The MOS6502 contained 3500 transistors. Today’s Intel Core i7 has more than 700 million, according to the article.

How we got from there to here shouldn’t be forgotten. After all, technologies don’t exist in a vacuum. They are creations, extensions of ourselves that, in turn, influence what we become. As Silverman points out, “People take for granted that our digital artifacts are going to be preserved.” But there’s no mandate for this and no manual on how to go about it. Fortunately, whether for microprocessors or the Internet’s first web pages, digital archaeologists are taking on the challenge.

The guys of Visual6502.org are now working on more chips. Follow their progress peeling back the layers through these high-res die shots.

via Mims’s Bits

Image: visual6502.org

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