1010: Ten Computers in Ten Months

Dear The Internet,

I’m starting a crazy project, and I need your help. 1010 is a scope-restricted, long form variant of the “N in N” schemes you may have heard of before (7 in 7, 4 in 4). But instead of a fast-paced but freeform event, 1010 will be slow and focused and bounded: I will build ten computers in ten months.

My motivation? I miss hacking hardware. As a coder it’s easy to forget about the secret world of silicon and copper. So to get back into it, I’m going to design and build some hardware, and you’re going to keep me honest. I’m not talking about assembling my own Linux box with some fancy motherboard and high-end graphics card and lots of cursing about drivers. Oh, no. I’m going to get neck deep in implementation details, sketch out machine architectures, devise instruction sets, and wire data busses by hand. This is gonna be hardcore.

The rules:

• Build one Turing-Complete computation device each month for ten consecutive months. (Bonus points for esoteric hardware that still computes.)

• Devices must be started and completed in the same calendar month. (Yes, August has advantages over February; deal.)

• Each computation device needs to be user-programmable to run arbitrary code. Devices will be documented and posted on the 1010 web site by the last day of the month, with example code.