Dave Plummer builds custom RAM board for PDP-11 using ChatGPT
Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer known for work on Task Manager and Windows Pinball, used ChatGPT and the EasyEDA online circuit simulator to design a new RAM board for the 1970s PDP‑11. The board fits on a Q‑Bus backplane and uses a Lattice MachXO2 FPGA model 2000HC as a memory controller, four ISSI 1 MB memory chips, a U2S I/O chip, DIP switches, and a few capacitors. The PDP‑11’s…
Key points
- Dave Plummer, former Microsoft engineer, builds a 4 MB RAM board for PDP‑11 using Lattice MachXO2 FPGA.
- Board uses four ISSI 1 MB chips, U2S I/O chip, and EasyEDA circuit design.
- PDP‑11 bus requires word‑aligned access, so memory returns every second word; fixed in FPGA code.
Veteran Microsoft engineer makes his own RAM from scratch using AI — custom FPGA board dodges extreme 1970s PDP-11 memory prices
Tom's Hardware · 31 October 2026
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