Lecture 16

The computers we have today are built from hardware components that we have seen already. From the basic circuits we can build adders, flipflops, multiplexers, and demultiplexers, and with a lot of time at hand we could put all these compents together and build a real machine.

In this lecture we concentrate on the general layout of the von Neumann machine architecture, in particular how program instructions can be represented as data and expressed in form of bits, stored in memory, and interpreted functionally by appropriate circuitry.

Reading: An invitation to Computer Science. Chapter 5: The von Neumann architecture.