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Guidelines

1.- Modularity

The Heritage-1 minicomputer is housed into one or more units (enclosures) which in turn contain one or more PCB cards. The design must exploit such topology in order to allow for flexible configurations at both the unit and the overall system levels.

2.- Extensibility

Apart from the fact that the overall system can be extended by adding units and each unit can be in turn extended with new cards, each circuit inside a card (such as the ALU inside the CPU card) must be designed with extensibility in mind. For example, adding support for new arithmetic operations should not cause a total redesign of the CPU card.

3.- Concurrency

The Heritage-1 topology is naturally suitable for asynchronous concurring processing taking place over different units. This feature must be exploited in order to increase overall system efficiency.

4.- Reliability

Effort must be exercised to achieve reasonable reliability of the overall system. No new feature should be added at the cost of reliability descent.

5.- Reasonable performance

Although the Heritage-1 minicomputer is not meant to be fast compared with today's technology, annoying poor performance will not be acceptable. This must push to design to seek efficienty.