Where do I start?

OK, seems like a general plan of attack is needed. There is clearly a lot to do.

You may have noticed that I am working on arithmetic. So, why not start there?
I plan to learn and breadboard everything from a simple add through a double floating divide.

That actually seems pretty fun, and I will start to get answers to the question, how fast will it be? We all know that the KI-10 had a 110 ns basic clock cycle. (You did right?) But less memorized was the 170-190 ns cycle needed to do an arithmetic ADD cycle. I am looking at my probable adder chip, the 74LS181 and trying to get propagation delays. IT looks like about 30 ns for most stuff but a little bit more for one logical operation?

That does not include other gates and latches which will be needed for the "ADD" cycle, but even so, it looks like I should be able to do 2 or even 3 times the speed of the original!

So, Al maybe I can get KL-10 speeds without that insane ECL logic!

Now for those of you keeping score at home, let's just look at what that means.
KL-10 mainframe    processor clock  33 MHz
Intel Core I7 in my current desktop   3.3 GHz.

So, it is the case that my current desktop computer is about 100 times faster than this old stuff!! i.e. this project is for fun, not real usability.

back to the plan....

So, in general the bullet points are
1 arithmetic
2 memory addressing (with paging, etc.
3 instruction decode (Can I do micro-code?)
3 processor status (user mode versus privileged mode)
4 I/O instructions and I/O bus.
6 PI (Programmed Interrupt) System

I need a more detailed list, and this will expand greatly as we go along. I don't know what I don't know. NO, that is NOT a Rumsfeld. The list at the link below will change as we go along.

Todo & question list for Dec-10 project

Maybe over the weekend I am actually gonna build something.