It used to be common for hobbyist electronics and computer magazines to publish designs that readers could reproduce at home. For example, the famous Atari Punk Console synthesizer design was first published in 1980 in a magazine printed by Radio Shack. Most published designs were simple and affordable enough for hobbyists to build, but some were quite ambitious. In 1981, Wireless World Magazine published a design for a simple 8-bit microcomputer called the Nanocomp 6809 and Dave Henry recently built it on solderless breadboards.
Solderless breadboards already existed when Wireless World Magazine published the Nanocomp 6809 design, but they weren’t nearly as affordable or ubiquitous as they are today. The designers intended for Nanocomp 6809 to be built with point-to-point wiring and very rudimentary homemade PCBs. Today it is almost trivial to get professional quality PCBs, because they’re affordable and easy to order. Henry could have gone that route to build a polished Nanocomp 6809, but that wouldn’t have given him an authentic retro experience. Instead, he chose to build this computer in the same way that a hobbyist might have in 1981.
As you may have guessed by the name, the Nanocomp 6809 utilizes a Motorola 6809 8-bit microprocessor, which was also used in the TRS-80 Color Computer (“CoCo”), the Commodore SuperPET, the Vectrex video game console, and others. Unlike many other processors from the era that are only available today used or as NOS (New Old Stock), versions of the 6809 are still being manufactured today and you can buy one for around $15. Of course, the Nanocomp 6809 requires several other components and not all of them are easy to find. In some cases it may be easier to adapt the design to work with newer components, but Henry actually built the Nanocomp 6809 back in ’81 and still had everything in the attic.
Instead of attempting to repair the (now damaged) original Nanocomp 6809, Henry stripped the components and used them for the new breadboard build. That required several breadboards, but the complete computer is actually surprisingly compact (and could be even smaller if Henry chose to really cram everything in). Full details of the build are available on the project page and a series of YouTube videos if you want to create your own Nanocomp 6809.
