Today we are very used to running a rich variety of operating systems and programs on our mobile devices, from Office on a Windows laptop to a game on our Android smartphones, we are accustomed to ...

When programming a microcontroller, there are some physical limitations that you’ll come across much earlier than programming a modern computer, whether that’s program size or even processor speed. To ...

If you cut your teeth on Z-80 assembly and have dabbled in other assembly languages, you might not find much mystery in creating programs using the next best thing to machine code. However, if you ...

Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t the most fashionable computer game out there in 1999. But if you took a look beneath the pixels—the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the ...

A programming language that is one step away from machine language. Each assembly language statement is translated into a machine instruction by the assembler. Programmers must be well versed in the ...

Once we’ve built a computer, the next step is to develop an assembly language and then an assembler that can assemble our programs. In my previous column, we introduced the concept of the big-endian ...

When my grandfather died six months ago, my sister said it felt as if we had lost a family archive. We knew he was an electrical engineer who began his career at the dawn of digital computing. We knew ...

The native language of the computer. In order for a program to run, it must be presented to the computer as binary-coded machine instructions that are specific to that CPU family. Although programmers ...