The PDP-8 Class Project

104 Electrical Engineering students in 18 teams over 7 years designed computers as part of a Digital Systems course the author taught. The goal was to load and then execute a program to calculate and display prime numbers on their team's computer. This is the true story of how the course was conceived, how the computers were designed, and what lessons were learned. The book describes the computer architecture (which was based on that of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8) and the student implementation in VHDL. Full source code is available. Knowledge of digital design is necessary to fully appreciate this book.