My friend has been making a working replica of the Patinho Feio. As I happen to know Portuguese, I translated some of his materials about this project, including making English subtitles for his (very wide-ranging) university lecture about the project.
(Maybe I'll feel silly about having done this at some point, because AI translation is getting so good...)
There's an amazing amount of material about this computer available online now. Lots of manuals, interviews, images, and so on. It must have been really exciting to be involved with that project in the early 1970s. (As I understanding it, an American electrical engineer who had worked with computer architecture was a visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo at that time, and led the students through many of the necessary steps -- but all of the implementation and design, down to the instruction set with its Portuguese-language mnemonics, was the students' own work.)
In his lecture, he notes that ITA (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronaútica) actually turns out to have made its own computer even earlier than USP's Patinho Feio, but there's almost no documentation of any kind about ITA's machine available, whereas USP students published various theses related to the Patinho Feio and preserved extensive documentation and even physical artifacts and software related to it. He thus calls the ITA computer the "0th Brazilian computer".
https://forum.fiozera.com.br/t/historical-preservation-of-th...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaDzfq42B-g
(Maybe I'll feel silly about having done this at some point, because AI translation is getting so good...)
There's an amazing amount of material about this computer available online now. Lots of manuals, interviews, images, and so on. It must have been really exciting to be involved with that project in the early 1970s. (As I understanding it, an American electrical engineer who had worked with computer architecture was a visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo at that time, and led the students through many of the necessary steps -- but all of the implementation and design, down to the instruction set with its Portuguese-language mnemonics, was the students' own work.)
In his lecture, he notes that ITA (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronaútica) actually turns out to have made its own computer even earlier than USP's Patinho Feio, but there's almost no documentation of any kind about ITA's machine available, whereas USP students published various theses related to the Patinho Feio and preserved extensive documentation and even physical artifacts and software related to it. He thus calls the ITA computer the "0th Brazilian computer".