Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer, has re-created the entire Commodore 64 on one chip and inserted it into a joystick, with several games, (like the cool Atari-in-a-joystick games) allowing nostalgic thirtysomethings to relive their youths. A NYT/news.com article has an interesting profile of Ellsworth, her creation, and other projects she’s worked on.
The sooner this comes to the UK the better.
Jeri is a genius! 🙂
Have read rumours for a couple of month’s….
She is THE 64-lady.
The best game ever: Red Storm Rising for C-64!
http://www.vintage.org/2002/main/bio.php?id=11
I was thinking the same thing. I wish my girlfriend was into that kinda stuff. sigh.
The Homepage http://c64upgra.de/c-one/
For instance, someone who wanted to turn the device into an improved version of the original machine could modify it to add a keyboard, monitor and disk drive.
But then, what would I able to do with it? Will it run the Contiki OS? I would tend to think so, since it could be an improved version of Commodore 64. Coupled with a USB port and a nic, this would be awesome.
I think she’s VERY pretty…
And she has LOTS of brains.
I wish her all the best success, and perhaps one day I’ll buy a C-One.
Right now, I’m about to buy a Replica I (An Apple I Replica) just to play with.
But, it looks like the C-One could have an Apple I compatibility mode as well…
And then I clicked on the second page and the article mentions how she cornered Wozniak and got him talking about the design of the Apple floppy controller.
I love these self-taught types that reject the notion that university professors are the sole proprietors of knowledge dissemination. Drive, a thirst for knowledge, the internet, and a library are all you need.
Exactly, she tried college and the college professors didn’t like her asking questions that contradicted what was being taught.
Her current employer’s says that she has passion for her work.
If you enjoy your job, then your in a much better position in life.
I met Jeri at the Aachen Amiga show mentioned where she was showing the C=1.
Good to see she’s getting some recognition outside the technical community, I never knew she was self taught though, that’s even more impressive – all the best people are.
Chatted to here for a bit, very smart woman …and yes, attractive too 😉
Drive, a thirst for knowledge, the internet, and a library are all you need.
WOW! Brave fellow.
odd…. netcraft comfirms the c64 is dead
http://news.netcraft.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=c…
Now, that device is cool. I need to check one of those out!
Drive, a thirst for knowledge, the internet, and a library are all you need.
Ironically enough, the internet itself was started by a bunch of former MIT people working at DARPA, in conjunction with an MIT person working at UCLA (Leonard Kleinrock), SRI (Stanford Research Institute), and a company started by two MIT professors (BBN Technologies).
http://www.jbrain.com/vicug/gallery/c64dtv
I remember some of the classics as: Alter Ego, M.U.L.E., and Little Computer People.
When I was an ASIC eng’r at Digital, one third of our team of approx 20 ASIC designers were women. In spec / code / test reviews, you can’t tell gender from specs & code.
ASIC & FPGA design are a great combination of EE & CS. You get to use many special tools for all stages of chip design and the work can be very varied. I like Jeri’s rare respect for the old school of design where appreciation of transistor & gate counts made for better design. This may still help with FPGA design but less so in ASICs.
A great thing about todays large FPGAs is that open source designs are available for CPUs, controllers etc.
I guess I shouldn’t be suprised that so many /. comments and a few here are kind of sexist.
Why must all discussions about various prominent geek women degenerate into whether or not she is hot. Who cares. She is smart, and that’s all you need to be a geek.
I understand that intelligence is a turn on for most geek men, but just show some restraint, mmmkay?
Does it have chuckie egg? It was my favorite game when i was a kid
http://www.chuckie-egg.org/article.php3?story_id=36
Its frustrating that so many of our gifted women choose female dominated professions such as marketing over hardcore infotech.
Infotech has some of the softest, nicest guys you’d ever want to meet, so the evildick patriarchy is /dev/null.
Oh come on. These comments and those on slashdot are proof that most guys interested in IT have no idea. There may not be as many testosterone pumping rednecks that like to beat people up, but there are plenty of jerks who want to ridicule and mock the accomplishments of a woman simply because she is a woman. Or as these comments show, would rather discuss her looks than her technical abilities.
Give it a rest. IT guys seem to have _less_ of an idea than most of the male population.
Ironically enough, the internet itself was started by a bunch of former MIT people working at DARPA, in conjunction with an MIT person working at UCLA (Leonard Kleinrock), SRI (Stanford Research Institute), and a company started by two MIT professors (BBN Technologies).
And this is ironic how?
IIt is ironic in that academia has created a tool that facilitates the advancement of those who reject the utility of academia.
And who rejects the utility of academia?
I wonder if she has a hot looking brother
<oh behave!> 😉
By your logic, we should accept the utility of the cold war because that was what enabled the DARPA funding in the first place.
And who rejects the utility of academia?
Many people today reject the utility of academia. I inferred from the somewhat sarcastic tone of your post that you were in that category. In particular, the comment about “university professors [being] the sole proprietors of knowledge dissemination” seemed unnecessary since most people in academia do not claim any such thing.
By your logic, we should accept the utility of the cold war because that was what enabled the DARPA funding in the first place.
It is an unfortunate, but true, fact that war is incredibly useful in spurring the growth of technology. WWI and WWII were pivotal in the development of airplane technology, for example. The US defense industry is responsible for making a lot of “big dreams” come true, simply because it is one of the few places where scientists and researchers can get a lot of money to tackle far-out ideas. Commercial industry is risk-averse in a way that the military can afford not to be, and thus while the success rate of entities like DARPA might be low, when they hit a pay-off, it can be an enormous one.
I inferred from the somewhat sarcastic tone of your post that you were in that category. In particular, the comment about “university professors [being] the sole proprietors of knowledge dissemination” seemed unnecessary since most people in academia do not claim any such thing.
It’s no secret that certain people in academia have a hard time accepting challenges to traditional orthodoxes in learning.
It is an unfortunate, but true, fact that war is incredibly useful in spurring the growth of technology. WWI and WWII were pivotal in the development of airplane technology, for example. The US defense industry is responsible for making a lot of “big dreams” come true, simply because it is one of the few places where scientists and researchers can get a lot of money to tackle far-out ideas. Commercial industry is risk-averse in a way that the military can afford not to be, and thus while the success rate of entities like DARPA might be low, when they hit a pay-off, it can be an enormous one.
Yeah, pretty much common knowledge. The US probably wouldn’t have gone to the moon without a cold war. Of course most people would have accepted delays in technological progress if that meant not being on the brink of global thermonuclear war.
P.S. offtopic, but since I’ve got you here, have you ever used an gui toolkits with scheme, and if so what? I’m finding that the variations, implementations, and all around derivatives of Lisp and Scheme to be more out of control than previously thought. For example, apparently gtk-gauche only works with gauche. As of right now it looks like promsing options are wxWidgets with mzScheme and some dotNetScheme that works with PLT scheme too.
Where can someone get a C-ONE board in Noth America? At what price? This thing look realy cool!
by the way, note this:
“She moved to Walla Walla, Wash., and began attending Walla Walla College, a Seventh Day Adventist school that offered a circuit design program.”
hate to sound like an academic snob, but ‘Walla Walla College, a Seventh Day Adventist school’ is hardly Harvard, is it? My experience of university was utterly different; I was positively encouraged to disagree with and debate the ideas of my tutors. And at least in my subject area there was hardly a deadening universal Academic Opinion – you’d be amazed at the vitriol you get in debates about the Tudor monarchy in obscure historical journals…:)
What Scheme are you using? I’m partial to Bigloo myself, and the Bigloo-Gtk bindings at http://bigloo-lib.sourceforge.net are pretty up-to-date (supports GTK+ 2.4).
Yes, I just downloaded bigloo, but didn’t notice any mention of gui bindings at the main site. I’ve been using DrScheme so far in RSR5 mode. I’ll check out the sourceforge site. thanks. Of course using bigloo means I’ll have to use emacs, with its emacs plugin (ugh).
Bigloo looks like good stuff though because it has experimental support to compiling down to CIL and already does Java bytecode – as well as its general philosophy of addressing some of the shortcomings of Lisp/Scheme and its variants.
Wow, imagine the A500 with a 1 MB Ram in a joystick like that.
That would be the greatest!
Cool product!
Let me know when women develop a Linux distro compiled and designed by women for women ;0(
You mean like Debian Women?
http://women.alioth.debian.org/
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/03/173216&from=rss
What I’d really like is the Amiga equivalent… say with 2MB RAM would certainly make me happy… with DVI output… and USB 2 input for emulating floppy drives and all bunches of other input.
Uhm, I think you need to get out a bit more! 😉
“I love these self-taught types that reject the notion that university professors are the sole proprietors of knowledge dissemination. Drive, a thirst for knowledge, the internet, and a library are all you need.”
And a soldering iron.
“What I’d really like is the Amiga equivalent… ”
I gather the currently available programmable chips are not big enough but this may be possible in 2 or 3 years.
The chips would have to be cheap enough to make the product saleable.
This is basically an Altera SOPC from the pictures… We use those here. Prety cool, but not as mind bending as *actually* designing a chip. It’s all pretty much done in software. Essentially, this looks awfully like a SOPC programmed to emulate a 650x chip (was the c=64 a 6502 0r a 6509?) with some additional code to do the other stuff.
What would be cool (and please tell me if this *is* what happened) is if they got the SOPC and got it stamped into a real chip. That would be cool.
Where can I find more information about the ‘Atari-in-a-joystick’ device ?
No Karateka? omg!
…it’s a bad thing to say that someone looks good.
Okay so maybe there are better ways to express it, but that doesn’t make it right to tell people how sexist they are, when all they did was think another person looked good.
To be a sexist is an entirely different thing imo, as one would have to use sex in an insulting way and I can’t really see how it’s insulting to think someone looks good (however, as said before, it could’ve been expressed better).
Personally, I would love to hear once in a while that I’m hot, because frankly how often do you hear that as a guy? (no, I don’t mean if you are Brad Pitt)
It could be just as insulting to never hear you’re hot, as to hear it constantly.
Now, I’ve been a (silent) fan of this project for a long time now and I think it’s awesome that it’s not just guys who still worship the C=64, just think how sad that would be..
Sad tho that no Last Ninja games are on this thing.. :/
If I have the money, I’ll probably buy a C-One someday (and maybe this joystick thingie if it comes to PAL).
I have this thing. It is pretty cool, but the games aren’t nearly as fun as I recall from my childhood. International Karate seems to be my favorite. I am still just as good as I once was for some reason. Really missing Bruce Lee though.
Near perfect emulation of all C64 hardware via software is available on virtually every console / x86 / linux architecture.
So why is this news considered ‘a breakthrough’?
So why is this news considered ‘a breakthrough’?
Maybe because of its size?
Well, you could run a C64 emulator on a Sony U70 and be pretty close
. It’d be rather a lot more expensive though, heheh. Of course, with the hardware in the U70 you could also emulate an N64 and a Playstation very nicely…
I remamber my C64, I still have it in my closet.