<div dir="ltr">BTW, using a ROM to sequence data to DMA for driving apps was very common. I put the phase table for 3Q motors in ROM and use mpu to pull out the correct A B and C sinusoid values to drive the motor amp. <div>I scaled and generated the values for the table offline. I knew how to drive the sine wave. Also, at JC we learned on an IBM 1620 (nickname CADET). where CADET means Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try. It used </div><div>Addition tables loaded in memory from IBM punched card (Holerith was an IBMer) that loaded the table from the cards at IPL. \U0001f923</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Dec 20, 2025 at 12:33\u202fPM Pete Soper via TriEmbed <<a href="mailto:triembed@triembed.org">triembed@triembed.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">The blog below caught my attention on Hacker News and got me thinking about bottom up understanding of computing. This is about projects relating to some kind of demo/contest event for FPGA's (field programmable gate arrays), but the author goes into some detail about how entertaining "toys" like a VGA graphics generator can be made. That led to thinking about whether learning to work with FPGAs would help somebody to understand how computers "really work". But a little more thought made me ask myself whether a modern programmer even needs to know about, let alone understand machine language. Not clear that this is relevant. (but I'd love it if at least one CS course would show how decompiling a single C++ statement leveraging overloading, polymorphism, grotesque layers of header references, etc can result in an avalanche of machine code)</span>
<br><span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">Anyway, I haven't even finished this and I'm talked out of the supposition. :-)</span>
<br><span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">But perhaps some of you might be interested in playing with FPGAs, as the hobby level hardware is very cheap and tools and examples are plentiful.</span>
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<br><span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><a href="https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html" target="_blank">https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html</a></span>
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<br><span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">Pete</span>
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</blockquote></div><div><br clear="all"></div><div><br></div><span class="gmail_signature_prefix">-- </span><br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature">Best regards, Mike</div>