[wallfly]

Does anyone know of an "online shell" and tutorial combo that would give a similar kind of learning experience for understanding how computers work at the lower levels, as mentioned at the end of the article:

"The day of study had begun with what must be the ultimate hands-on technology experience: Mr Abrams got the students to be a computer.

They each took on the role of a different part of the machine - CPU, accumulator, RAM and program counter - and simulated the passage of instructions through the hardware.

The five shuffled data around, wrote it to memory, carried out computations and inserted them into the right places in the store."

Through self-study of CS texts and good code that others have written I've been gaining a lot more depth to my OOP programming skills.

I'd love though to get a more ground up, "live action" education on what's happening at the machine level, albeit it would probably need to be based on the simulation of a tiny computer by modern standards, maybe something like Knuth's MixMaster.

[Tichy]

Not an online shell, but perhaps playing with Arduino would be a good way to experience basic computing.

[indy]

I recommend The Element of Computing Systems (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/). It's has no "online shell" but the book is accompanied with hardware simulators

[wallfly]

Perfect! Thanks a bunch.

[wallfly]

Ordered on Amazon! Really, I feel very excited, just wanted to say thank you again. I had not stumbled across this resource when googling around for such an intro/guide, or maybe it just didn't catch my eye.