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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">The subject caught my mind. So in
some systems there is a layer between the hardware and the
instructions that are part of the architecture. An example would
be the microcode that creates the Z architecture on IBM Mainframes
(and a lot of the prior revisions of the architecture). basically
the architecture is micro-coded in the native architecture to
create the defined architecture that folks expect.</div>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Bill</div>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/20/2025 12:33 PM, Pete Soper via
TriEmbed wrote:<br>
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<span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">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:0; margin-bottom:0;">Anyway, I
haven't even finished this and I'm talked out of the
supposition. :-)</span> <br>
<span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">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> <br>
<br>
<span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;"><a
href="https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html</a></span>
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<span dir="ltr" style="margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0;">Pete</span>
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