I have thought about making a voltage tunable oscillator using 1-2 Y5V ceramic capacitors. I briefly looked to see if I can find a DC bias versus capacitance graph online but could not. I have some samples in my lab. I have seriously thought about discarding them, but I guess each time I thought they might be interesting for a play/demo…
Having learned about the “new 8 bit microprocessors” available when I was at university (so the 6800, and 8080), my first job was at a Swiss company called Hasler (long since been a part of Ascom), where they had a “message store and forwarding computer” they made. It was made of 74xx TTL chips, in a very modular way (think eurocard modules, each with a metal case over it. Plugged into a rack, with wire-wrapped connections between the backplane connector pins). The CPU part was something like 12U tall! The updated version used core memory modules, and 14" fixed head hard disks!
So yes, CPUs used to be made from simple ICs!
Of course. I missed the vacuum tube generation but I was there when transistors and punch cards were in use.
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