Keeping old computers alive for deeper understanding of computer architecture
Hisanobu Tomari, Kei Hiraki · 2015
Computer architectures, as they are seen by students, are getting more and more monolithic: few years ago a student had access to x86 processor on his or her laptop, SPARC server in the backyard, MIPS and PowerPC on large SMP system, and Alpha on calculation server. Today, only architectures that students experience writing program on are x86_64 and possibly ARM. On one hand, this simplifies their learning, but on the other hand, this makes it harder to discover options that are available in designing an instruction set architecture.