What Hacker News says

drpixieJan 2026

There are several versions of the Cray 1 Hardware Reference manual online. They're not as descriptive as Design of a Computer, but still informative.

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drpixieFeb 2024

And the intriguing load/store scheme.

There were no LOAD or STORE instructions. Instead there were "address" registers (18 bits wide), matched to each "operand" (60 bit data) register.

When you updated an address register, that memory address was automatically read into the correspond operand register. Except for the last couple address registers - updating them performed a write from the corresponding operand into memory.

By our current way of thinking, it seems arse about. But it worked well when you understood it, and apparently improved concurrency. Loads and stores became sort-of transparent. (Remembering that memory was as fast, sometimes faster than the CPU, so a few instructions saved was worth the occasional unnecessary load.)

See "Design of a Computer, The Control Data 6600" by J E Thornton.

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kkenDec 2013

>"In 1970, J. E. Thornton wrote a book called Design of a Computer: The Control Data 6600 http://ygdes.com/CDC/DesignOfAComputer_CDC6600.pdf

I love this book. The CDC6600 was the first architecture to implement many of paradigms that were later assigned to the RISC architecture. And Cray did it 15 years earler.

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ppereiraJun 2013

I don't understand your critique. A book manages to condense the design of a computer -- from gate-level to operating system -- in a 300 page tutorial and you do not like the fact that it glosses over some details? I doubt any single person has the knowledge to build a modern computer from scratch, and few people have/need the knowledge to go from gate level to OS-level in the real world.

This book aims to change that in an simplified environment. I don't fault it for skipping over Karnaugh maps just like I don't fault it for skipping the physics of cosmic background radiation, or the techniques used to compensate for failures in multi-level flash memory cells. These details are not on the most direct route from (simulated) nand gates to tetris.

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bri3dSep 2020

From "scratch," as in raw materials, absolutely not. Even the most dedicated home-fabrication hobbyists ( http://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/ ) have come nowhere near achieving the transistor density required to construct the "OberonStation's" CPU or memory, whether taped out (laid into a chip design using actual silicon gates) or built using a programmable gate array.

From a circuit board etched by someone else and PCB components purchased online and soldered together by a hobbyist, certainly, without too much difficulty (the package used by the programmable gate array requires a bit of specialty equipment, but is within reach).

One other point about Oberon is that I _believe_ that because the design predates open-source FPGA toolchains, a closed toolchain is still required to convert the Verilog (high-level design describing the processor logic) into a netlist (FPGA configuration), and it hasn't been taped out into a chip, either. So, the book covers the design of a computer end-to-middle - that is, without covering how the block / HDL level design becomes logic gates, and without covering how said gates are then manufactured. This is probably fine - the scope has to end somewhere. The linked NAND-to-Tetris articles cover the other end - from logic gates up to typical computing constructs (adder, registers, shifters, etc.).

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kpsDec 2013

A few historically interesting architecture books that are now available for free online are:

Thornton, James E, Design of a computer: the Control Data 6600 http://ygdes.com/CDC/DesignOfAComputer_CDC6600.pdf

Gordon Bell, Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/CGB%20Fi...

Levy, Henry M., Capability-Based Computer Systems http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/

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