In this installment of Simple Circuits, I thought it might be interesting to review a technology that I found particularly useful in the 1980's. It is called a micro code based computer and this type of circuit can still find use today. Building your own micro code based computer is actually quite simple and requires only a handful of readily available parts. These "computer" circuits would execute very fast, single step, operations back in the days when microcontrollers were uncommon and when microprocessors only ran at a couple of MHz. The programs of microprocessors also required several instructions (and multiple clock cycles) to execute a single operation.
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