Computer Architecture

11

RETRO ARCHITECTURES

Now that you’ve made it through the theory, let’s have some fun. Part III will consolidate your theoretical knowledge by programming on a series of real, emulated architectures. It’s possible to skip around these chapters depending on your interests, but they present systems roughly in order of their complexity and history, so seeing and programming the earlier systems may help you understand the later ones.

We previously studied the Analytical Engine and Manchester Baby, and in this chapter we’ll progress to 1980s 8-bit and then 16-bit systems. Modern embedded systems are somewhat similar to these retro systems, so we’ll ...