COMP 231-01, Introduction to Systems Programming and Computer Organization, Fall 2002

Abstract

This course takes a bottom-up view of the computer as computational machine, beginning with bits and bytes and moving up to higher-level languages. The process of computation is presented through a hierarchy of virtual machine abstractions, beginning with the hardware and moving upward through various levels of increasingly sophisticated software, culminating in an introduction to the C language on the UNIX operating system. We will examine the facilities available at each layer of abstraction, along with the mechanisms and software tools that lead to the realization of the hierarchy.