Keeping Old Computers Alive for Deeper Understanding of Computer Architecture Hisanobu Tomari Kei Hiraki Grad. School of Information Grad. School of Information Science and Technology, Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan Tokyo, Japan
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract—Computer architectures, as they are seen by stu- computers retrospectively. Working hardware is a requisite for dents, are getting more and more monolithic: few years ago a software execution environment that reproduces behavior of student had access to x86 processor on his or her laptop, SPARC socially and culturally important computers. server in the backyard, MIPS and PowerPC on large SMP system, and Alpha on calculation server. Today, only architectures that This paper presents our information science undergraduate students experience writing program on are x86 64 and possibly course for teaching concepts and methodology of computer ARM. On one hand, this simplifies their learning, but on the architecture. In this class, historic computer systems are used other hand, this makes it harder to discover options that are by students to learn different design concepts and perfor- available in designing an instruction set architecture. mance results. Students learn the different instruction sets In this paper, we introduce our undergraduate course that teaches computer architecture design and evaluation that uses by programming on a number of working systems. This historic computers to make more processor architectures acces- gives them an opportunity to learn what characteristics are sible to students. The collection of more than 270 old computers shared among popular instruction set, and what are special that were marketed in 1979 to 2014 are used in the class.