At the eastern edge of US-60, between University Avenue and the Box Springs Mountain Park, sits the bustling University of California-Riverside (UCR) campus. A modern university, encompassing ...

First, architecture basics are detailed with information on the register sets, data types, and memory and instruction formats. Next, instruction set extensions are detailed, which include Intel® ...

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 ...

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 ...

A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet nearly ...

Programmable devices have long fascinated humans, even before the advent of computers. As long as two centuries ago we had music boxes, tiny mechanisms that produced music encoded as pins on a ...

The history of computing could arguably be divided into three eras: that of mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Minicomputers provided an important bridge between the first mainframes and ...

Every software program is written in a programming language, and there are several languages for every major CPU series; typically an assembly language and a number of high-level languages. Assembly ...

The instructions a programmer writes when creating a program. Lines of code are the "source code" of the program, and one line may generate one machine instruction or several depending on the ...