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by todd8
1831 days ago
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My daughter finished her CS degree about a year ago. I was glad to see that one required class had her build a very simple computer from gates as her final project. I don’t know the details, but I think the computer had perhaps 10 different instructions. She didn’t like that project very much, but I thought it was valuable; someone has got to understand the principles of operation at that level. I started programming in the 60’s and at times had to load instructions into machines using binary on front panel switches. That’s the reasons that machines of that time had the lights and rows of switches on the front so that one could debug programs by looking at the lights to see the program counter, data value, or instruction. See [1] for a photo of a large front panel on an iconic machine of the time. I even recall pulling plug panels out of card processing equipment to reprogram the sorting and selecting of input data being run through machine as huge stacks of punch cards, see [2] for a picture of a mid-20th century plug panel for data-processing. The layers of abstraction are important. They enable us to construct some of the most useful, complex, and intricate artifacts ever made on our planet. Today I program in high level languages, and I get to use powerful frameworks, database systems, and amazing hardware right on my desk. Yet, I do miss some of the fun of invention and hacking on systems that I really understood in depth. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_panel#/media/File%3A36... [2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/133017817600?hash=item1ef87ad200:g:... |
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Interesting I thought CS was all software where computer with gate and low level programming were something of EE / Computer Engineering.