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 ...

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 ...

We all probably know that for ultimate control and maximum performance, you need assembly language. No matter how good your compiler is, you’ll almost always be able to do better by using your human ...

Programming in assembly language -- getting down to the direct manipulation of bytes and even bits -- is gaining in popularity, according the latest ranking by TIOBE, apparently spurred by the ...

In the days before computers usually used off-the-shelf CPU chips, people who needed a CPU often used something called “bitslice.” The idea was to have a building block chip that needed some ...

When my grandfather died six months ago, my sister said it felt as if we had lost a family archive. We knew he was an electrical engineer who began his career at the dawn of digital computing. We knew ...

Since the question at the heart of Alan Turing’s influential 1950 essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” “Can Machines Think?” has been largely resolved by neural net technology, another ...

A programming language that is one step away from machine language. Each assembly language statement is translated into a machine instruction by the assembler. Programmers must be well versed in the ...