After reading about how a simple CPU works in J. Clark Scott's book and other sources I've been toying with the thought about building a CPU myself. It's a bit of a project and it will take a while but the journey is the reward. As one has to start somewhere I decided to start with the clock as the details of how one is built is a bit vague in the book.
As the CPU is for educational purposes I want it to run at a clock cycle of around one Hertz, so one can actually see how things are working. In addition to a long clock cycle to drive an 'enable' signal to put something on the data and address bus that interconnects everything, a shorter clock cycle in the middle of the overall clock cycle is required to drive the set inputs to a number of components such as registers, the memory etc. to tell them to take over what's currently on the bus. These two signals can be generated out of a clock and a delay of itself of half a clock cycle. The book describes how to use AND and OR gates to generate the enable and set pulses ot of those signals but not how to create clock signal itself and how to derive the delayed clock from the original clock.
So I improvised a bit and used two inverters (NOT gates) with a resistor and capacitor for a 1 Hz clock generator (in the middle of the picture), a transistor, some resistors and a capacitor for the delayed but inverted signal (the right part in the picture) and another NOT gate to revert the delayed impulse back. The circuit with the AND and NOT gates described in the book to generate the two output signals are shown on the left together with two LEDs to visualize the final signals.
The result looks a bit complicated but it's actually not, because there are three distinct and independent building blocks that can work independently of each other. One thing that makes things look a bit complicated is the use of one AND of the chip on the left and three NOT gates in the chip in the middle to create a single OR gate.
Using parts of the electronic kits I got as a teenager and parts of kits I recently bought to have a more complete setup was ideal for prototyping the circuit. I'm sure there are a million ways to build this more efficiently and with fewer parts. But efficiency was not the point of the exercise. There we go, the first step towards my own CPU is done.