Introduction

Tom Kelliher, CS 220

Sept. 5, 1997

Announcements

From Dr. Zimmerman:

Would you please inform your students in CS220 that it is important that they either have taken MA115 or are taking it this semester. If they don't they are going to get messed up with the prerequisites on later courses.

Assignment

Read Chapter 1 of Goodman & Miller and Chapter 1 of Abrahams & Larson. Browse Chapters 2 and 3 of A & L.

Introduction

1. History of computers, in a nutshell:
   1. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.

   2. Eckert & Mauchly: Eniac.

   3. A handful of computers.

   4. Early fears: job displacement, electronic brains.

   5. Vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits.

   6. The microprocessor.

   7. CISC vs. RISC.

   8. The gap between processor and memory performance.

   9. Superscalar: pipelining, branch prediction, multiple functional units, dynamic instruction scheduling, speculative execution.

2. At a software level, how does a computer work?
   1. CPU.

   2. Memory.

   3. I/O.

   4. Registers, multi-level caches, main memory, disk, ...

   5. Software/hardware interface: instruction set --- registers, instructions, addressing modes.

3. Models and abstraction --- How do we model the internal workings of the ISA?

Tell Me about Yourself

1. What do I need to know about you?

2. What do you find interesting?

3. What do you fear?

4. Why are you here?

5. Do you have any questions you'd like me to address?