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A love story

While searching the Internet for "relay computers" in May 2009, I discovered the world of "Homebrew CPUs" and got fascinated with the idea. Determined to build my own old-fashioned minicomputer, I commenced to study existing projects as well as building, little by little, a basic background on computer design and OS development.

One month later I had a total mess of ideas and a loved creature called: the "Heritage/1" homebrew minicomputer. Soon I realized that the project was too complex for a first try so I decided to put it on hold while devoted my efforts to a simpler "pre-project" that I called "PREHER/816". This would be a simple 8 bits machine resembling the architecture of a Z80 microprocessor; the purpose was then to gain the necessary experience for tackling the "main project" (Heritage/1) in a second step.

However, the ideas developed during the "pre-project" resulted interesting enough to me so I started to fall in love with the new computer up to the point that I decided to make her the main subject of my project and that's how she inherited the name reserved for the previous one: Heritage/1. Eventually the project evolved into an even simpler machine based on a quasi-ortogonal 16-bits architecture pretty much inspired by John Doran's D16/M minicomputer.

As a result of all this going back and forward, you will see mixed names in this web site. For now, Heritage/1 refers to the current machine being designed.

Heritage/1 is now meant to be simple and fast (as fast possible for the old technology it employs) and it is for the sake of speed that microcoding has been discarded at once and data transfer is being engineered so it takes the shorter path possible.

So Heritage/1 is (or will be) a simple 16 bits home-brew minicomputer and it is that (simplicity) the most loved feature that I find in the design being developed.

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Project start date: May 13 of 2009