6 Nov
2005
6 Nov
'05
2:57 p.m.
An aside to all this is one of the annoying things
when I was studying
computers early one (3++ decades ago) was "computer books" would endlessly
detail logic at the gate and flipflop level. Maybe discuss arithmetic and
sequential logic. They never quite cross the line to how these blocks form
Ues! Or else you got books that treated the processor as a black box. In
fact there were/are people who believe there's something magical about a
processor, that it can't be understood in terms of gates and FFs.
Nonsense, of course.
I remembrr when I got my first mini (a Philips P850), I sat down with the
techncial manual and started to understand how that processor worked. It
all became clear very quickly.
computers. It wasn't until the PDP-8 handbooks
that there was a connection
of the ideas of sequential logic controlling arithmetic and logical blocks.
A similar thing happened to me concerning telephone exchanges. Plety of
books explained relays and selectors. They would then give a sort-of
block description of a large exchange, with no detail. It all made no
sense to me. And then I got the well-known book 'Telephony'. This
contains some actual scheamtics for (electromechanical) exchanges,
explaining what the relays do and why. At last it all made a lot of sense.
-tony