Hackaday0 Hot0 comments4 min read1 d ago

Hackaday Europe 2026: The 1-Bit CPU That Ran Factories

A Hackaday Europe 2026 talk by Nicola Cimmino explores the Motorola MC14500B, a minimalist 1-bit CPU released in 1977 with just 16 instructions and 500 transistors, costing around $5 compared to the Zilog Z80's 8,500 transistors and $200 price tag. The chip became popular in early programmable logic controllers, replacing bulky relay-based industrial automation. The talk covers its architecture, ladder logic programming, conditional logic, and includes homemade breadboard and custom PCB implementations built by the speaker.

Read the original

#architecture #embedded #retrocomputing

Source: https://hackaday.com/2026/08/19/hackaday-europe-2026-the-1-bit-cpu-that-ran-factories. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.

Hackaday Europe 2026: The 1-Bit CPU That Ran Factories

Recommended for you

Domain-Driven Design matters more when AI writes your code

Modular Monoliths: Creating Real Boundaries Before Reaching for Microservices

InfoQ Opens Enrollment for New AI-Assisted Engineering Online Certification Program

Stop burning tokens on code review

SQLite for Everything

KAGA FEI ES4L15MA1 is a ridiculously small, ready-to-use BLE 6.0 module based on Nordic nRF54L15 SoC

What software architecture unexpectedly taught me about enterprise design

We Switched From REST to gRPC for the Performance, Got It, and Then Spent a Year Fighting Everything That Used to Be Trivial. Two Years of Running Both Taught Me the Real Tradeoff.

One account, the whole ecosystem

8syncdev.com

Courses

Coding practice

IELTS

ZUS — AI IDE

mind0

AcoLeads