The subject caught my mind. So in some systems there is a layer between the hardware and the instructions that are part of the architecture. An example would be the microcode that creates the Z
architecture on IBM Mainframes (and a lot of the prior revisions of the architecture). basically the architecture is micro-coded in the native architecture to create the defined architecture that
folks expect.
Bill
On 12/20/2025 12:33 PM, Pete Soper via TriEmbed 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
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