When 8 Bits is Overkill: Making Blinkenlights with a 1-bit CPU

Over the last half year I have explored the Motorola mc14500 - a CPU with a true one-bit architecture - and made it simulate Conway's Game of Life. This talk gives a look into how implementing a design for such a simplistic CPU can work, and how it's possible to address 256 LEDs and half a kiloword of memory with just four bits of address space. In the late seventies, Motorola created a very cheap CPU, intended to replace logic circuits made from electromechanical relays. The resulting IC is so minimalistic that it can hardly be recognized as a CPU: Its data bus is just a single bit wide, it has no program counter, and the address bus isn't connected to the cpu at all. Yet, with just a few support components, and some clever programming, it can be made to do all sorts of things. We'll explore hardware design and programming by taking a look at my implementation of Conway's Game of Life, and answer the question of how one can address 512 words of memory, as well as some other peripher