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Re:One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xe... by cr0sh on Monday June 19, 2017 @05:23PM (#14590573)
> The barrier to entry was very low.

If you had the money. Those chips weren't cheap back then (even the 74xx branch), and you still needed quite a few to do anything useful when it came to building a CPU.

Re:One-Hour Mandelbrot: Creating a Fractal on the Vintage Xe... by grkvlt on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @06:06PM (#14608376)
Well, there's always the 74181, a 4 bit ALU[0] as used in the Alto[1] among others like the NOVA and VAX 11/780.

0. https://mil.ufl.edu/4712/docs/74LS181.pdf

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/74181#Computers