Keeping Old Computers Alive for …

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An excerpt from Keeping Old Computers Alive for deeper understanding of computer architecture

Abstract—Computer architectures, as they are seen by students,
are getting more and more monolithic: few years ago a
student had access to x86 processor on his or her laptop, SPARC
server in the backyard, MIPS and PowerPC on large SMP system,
and Alpha on calculation server. Today, only architectures that
students experience writing program on are x86 64 and possibly
ARM. On one hand, this simplifies their learning, but on the
other hand, this makes it harder to discover options that are
available in designing an instruction set architecture.
In this paper, we introduce our undergraduate course that
teaches computer architecture design and evaluation that uses
historic computers to make more processor architectures accessible
to students. The collection of more than 270 old computers
that were marketed in 1979 to 2014 are used in the class. These
computers had to be repaired and restored to working condition
before using in exercise for the undergraduate students. By
experiencing different architectures from what is used everyday,
students learn the context of features that are standard today.
This paper also shows power consumption and benchmark
results obtained using old computers outside classroom.
These data are also used as the basis for learning about
concepts and issues of computer architecture.
…
                                      TABLE I
REPRESENTATIVE COMPUTER SYSTEMS IN OUR COLLECTION
Year     System name
1975 …
1983    HP-41CX
…
2009 …
…

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