COSMAC Elf Turns 50

If you were interested in computers in the early 1970s, you struggled to get time on real computers since owning your own was all but impossible. In the middle of the decade, though, you could get a few computers: the Mark VIII, the Altair, the Apple I, and several others. But in late 1976, an article in Popular Electronics said you could build a “powerful, expandable” computer for $80.

The article in question was by [Joseph Weisbecker], who, unknown to most of us at the time, was actually the RCA employee behind the CPU — an RCA 1802. [Tech Time Traveler] takes a close look at the spunky little computer’s history in the video you can see below. The 1802 was actually the second generation of the CPU, but the first that was all-in-one chip.

[Weisbecker] started building the CPU as a personal project. He’d been a hacker even in high school, building relay-based tic-tac-toe games, among other things.