The 1802 Membership Card For me and you and the 1802 TMSI c/o Lee Hart 814 8th Ave N Sartell MN 56377 (USA)
[email protected] http://www.sunrise-ev.com/1802.htm Rev. K4 -- last revised 7 July 2021 1 What the heck is this? It's an adventure, by cracky! The Membership Card is your ticket to the weird and wonderful world of microcomputing. Our guide will be the COSMAC 1802, perhaps the oddest and most entertaining microprocessor yet invented. I hope you'll find this manual to be equally odd and entertaining. The COSMAC 1802 was created at the dawn of the microcomputer revolution, by Joseph Weisbecker <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weisbecker> of RCA Corporation. It used their new CMOS process, for very low power consumption and high noise immunity. It was intended for military and aerospace; applications too tough for other microcomputers to survive. But Joe was a hacker at heart. His "Build the COSMAC ELF" article in Popular Electronics Aug 1976 described a simple low-cost 1802 computer. At the time, microcomputer systems cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. (Hmm... they still do today.) But Weisbecker's ELF cost about $80! Yet, it was an honest-to- goodness real live computer, able to do anything its much bigger cousins could do -- just a bit slower. It was the ideal trainer. Hobbyists built thousands of ELFs, learning about computer design, construction, and programming in the process. It set me, and thousands more on a career in engineering. 1802's were designed into all sorts of amazing things; video games, music synthesizers, Chrysler engine computers, military weapon systems, and even spacecraft such as NASA's Galileo and the Space Shuttle.