The "Steady Hand" Programmer Blows EEPROMs for Your Retro-Computing Projects — By Hand
Pseudonymous classic computing enthusiast "interrupt_tv," hereafter simply "TV," has built a device designed to bootstrap the ROM chips for homebrew single-board computer designs — by letting you enter the data into physical programmable read-only memory (PROM) chips by hand.
"Steady Hand is a digital circuit for programming EEPROMs [Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory chips] by hand," TV explains. It's inspired by [a] video by Ben Eater, where he creates a circuit for programming an EEPROM using DIP switches and jumper wires. Steady Hand is much more ergonomic than his design, though it is somewhat more complex. While Ben Eater provides the 'how' inspiration, the 'why' inspiration comes from Jeremiah Orians' stage0 project, and the general concept of bootstrapping: creating a computer software environment from nothing. When building a homebrew computer, one would typically use a significantly more complex modern computer to write the homebrew computer's software to an EEPROM. I...
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