Teaching computer organization using a PDP-8 simulator

Authors:
Brian Shelburne
Affiliations:
Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH
Venue:
SIGCSE '03 Proceedings of the 34th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Year:
2003

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Abstract

The simple yet elegant architecture of the PDP-8 makes it an ideal candidate for study in a computer organization course. The PDP-8 provides an uncomplicated example of a von-Neumann architecture. It is easy to program in machine code or assembler. It can be used to demonstrate coding low-level I/O routines, subroutine calls, uses of indirect addressing and handling interrupts. This paper discusses how a PDP-8 simulator written by the author is used in a computer organization course.