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RCA 1802 Gear on Ebay

I met Lee and his friends at the Midwest show, great guys. I didn’t think much of the 1802 because it was so different than the Intel/Moto processors of the time, but after meeting them I built an FPGA emulation of the RCA kit from a project that I saw on Hackaday. The 1802 would definitely get you learning microcomputers faster and cheaper than anything available at the time, that’s for sure.

Frankly, i’d rather have one of those membership cards than old pieces of hardware that may or may not work. Especially at those prices!
 
I was born in the mid-70s so this stuff was sort of already by the wayside by the time I was old enough to use a computer. Our first computer was a VIC-20.

But I'm curious if the stuff I've linked to is anything rare or special. I've bid up all of the items as far as I dared and could not overcome his bid except for the prototyping board, which I was leading with a bid of $51 until he bid $100 for it. Maybe he's just really desperate for this to complete his collection or something.

Maybe I'll drop a line on the COSMAC mailing group and see.
 
Although, the 1802 is a fun processor to play with, it is one of the most complex processors to program at assembly level of the older uPs. The I4004 is close to that level but still not to that level. The current ARM processors are maybe worse.
Dwight
 
Forgot to mention The CPU shack also has 1802 boards for sale

There were two early MCUs that were popular with the telemetry/remote instrumentation crowd back then.

One was the Intersil IM6100 (PDP8 clone-ish); the other was the CDP1802. The reason was that both were CMOS and could be clocked down to DC to save power, where the CPU drew mere microamperes. If you've got a battery powered device to be installed in an otherwise inaccessible location, this is exactly what you want. Add some low-power CMOS RAM and memory and you could run on batteries for months, waking up only when something needed attention.

Nowadays, we have more choices; for example outfits like TI have carved out a market segment with their MSP430 line that has a low-power draw in the tenths of microamps. Integrated memory includes MRAM and lots of peripheral functions.
 
If RCA would have pushed the 180x harder, they would have had a good SBC before the KIM and others. The 180x design had been sitting around at RCA for some time.
 
Slob said:
If RCA would have pushed the 180x harder, they would have had a good SBC before the KIM and others. The 180x design had been sitting around at RCA for some time.
Click to expand...

RCA hit a bad stretch of management (Robert Sarnoff, son of David) starting in 1965, deciding to diversify the companies holdings into carpeting, car rental, and TV dinners; hence the joke about RCA standing for "Rugs, Chickens and Automobiles). After a 1975 boardroom coup, RCA's futures were straight down. Eventually, the company was sold to GE, who broke the company up and sold it off. The IC division went to Harris. RCA only exists today as a name.
 
Well, someone wanted em... the complete-ish Microboard just went for $458 with a third bidder getting in above me. E*****o still took it though.

I was tempted but really.. it's from 1982, so not really that vintage, and what can you do with it? BASIC or Assembly.. woohoo.
 
As someone else has observed, the CDP1802 is a good "first" MPU to learn programming on, as it's very simple. Why the nuttiness over a couple of 1982 boards is a mystery to me.
 
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