Pete, There are many courses for an Engineer in Computer Systems science/engineering. And they include HLD and ISA and bit-slice and architecture. And yes, also compiler and interpreter design and machine language programming bootstrapping into assembly language and boot loaders. There are as they say the Whole Nine Yards. Many of us really old timers learnt machines from the ground up. I was younger than most when many many CPUs MPUs were being shoveled onto the mass market for embedded systems And the newest thing, personal computers. Most had no tools and had many of us using one system (with BASIC and DOS) to boot assembly languages for other cpu on bare hardware. I recall as a HS hobbyist typing in my own hex editor into memory the boot block of DOS on an (at the time smallest) 8" Shugart 128K floppy diskette. Those were the days. And when I got to UF their Computer engineering lab had US play with bitslice to build our own ALU. But fortunately, before even seeing the hardware in the lab... I simulated it on one of my PCs in my apartment; and was done in a half hour vs 2-3 that others had... coding by hand, pencil and paper, and using hex-keypad to key into raw HW. That was the best fun and learning of its time; I've often wondered how much it was repeated as "kids today" take for granted that infrastructure is Just There. So much so, that when I ask about Cross Platform tool development, nobody in Triangle Linux Users Group wants to volunteer to talk,,, I would but it's gotten way more complicated to keep Toolchains up to date (and functional) that Egg on Face is always a likely occurrence.
Thanks for your musing this AM and the memories it brought back. QED On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 12:33 PM Pete Soper via TriEmbed < [email protected]> wrote: > The blog below caught my attention on Hacker News and got me thinking > about bottom up understanding of computing. This is about projects relating > to some kind of demo/contest event for FPGA's (field programmable gate > arrays), but the author goes into some detail about how entertaining "toys" > like a VGA graphics generator can be made. That led to thinking about > whether learning to work with FPGAs would help somebody to understand how > computers "really work". But a little more thought made me ask myself > whether a modern programmer even needs to know about, let alone understand > machine language. Not clear that this is relevant. (but I'd love it if at > least one CS course would show how decompiling a single C++ statement > leveraging overloading, polymorphism, grotesque layers of header > references, etc can result in an avalanche of machine code) > Anyway, I haven't even finished this and I'm talked out of the > supposition. :-) > But perhaps some of you might be interested in playing with FPGAs, as the > hobby level hardware is very cheap and tools and examples are plentiful. > > https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html > > Pete > _______________________________________________ > Triangle, NC Embedded Interest Group mailing list > > To post message: [email protected] > List info: http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org > TriEmbed web site: https://TriEmbed.org > To unsubscribe, click link and send a blank message: mailto: > [email protected]?subject=unsubscribe > Searchable email archive available at > https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > > -- Best regards, Mike
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