29 Mar
2010
29 Mar
'10
10:57 a.m.
students on field trips to computer museums. However,
I am
particularly interested in examples where professors bring actual
working vintage equipment into the classroom (like a pdp-11 or a
teletype machine) and tried to teach their students to operate it.
Has anybody on this list tried it or know of people who do it?
I am not a lecturer (or whatever you wish to call it), so I can't give
actual experience. But some years ago now I was present at a set of 8
talks given to a student computer society about the design and operation
of an 'real' processor board. Said processor consisted of about 260
chips, TTL, PALs, 2900 series, etc and was analused to gate level in most
cases. I think every last IC was mentioned somewhere.
I feel that many students could understand the design of a sime
minicomputer processor (top of my list, becauase it is simple and
well-docuemtned would be the PDP8/e) And IMHO there is no better way to
understand how a processor really owrks than to analyse a real processor,
and thus get to see all the detials (much as IMHO the best operating
systems cources examine the source code of an actual OS).
-tony