Category Archives: ITE 221

Rediscovering Project Oberon

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Steven Golden

Way back in the early 1990s, when I was browsing a campus bookstore for the first time in my life, I remember coming across a remarkable book called “Project Oberon – The Design of an Operating System and Compiler” by … Continue reading →

Posted in ITE 221 | 10 Comments

Learning about Linkers and Loaders

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Steven Golden

Every programmer knows what a compiler does, right? Well, at least most of us pretend to know, although few seem to have ever dug into the details – but that’s okay, as long we know what a compiler is good … Continue reading →

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Q330 Serial Port Communication

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Steven Golden

The Quanterra Q330 is a seismic data logger originally manufactured by Quanterra Inc., now a subsidiary of Kinemetrics Inc. The Q330 saw widespread adoption in the early 2000s. While it is not the newest Kinemetrics product anymore, there are still … Continue reading →

Posted in ITE 221, Q330 | 2 Comments

SVG: An Image Description Language for the Web

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Steven Golden

In the early days of the Web, most browsers allowed exactly two formats for embedded images: The lossless Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), which was a good choice for logos, diagrams, and primitive animation loops, and the lossy compressed Joint Photographic … Continue reading →

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Learning about CPU Cache

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Steven Golden

Practically every programmer, and most other computer users as well, know that CPU cache is that small but incredibly fast memory right inside or next to the CPU, which keeps copies of frequently accessed data, so that the CPU must … Continue reading →

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Is there a Future for Tape Backup?

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Steven Golden

As part of my job, I am sometimes confronted with backup issues as well as aspects of “data archeology”. For example, a while ago I had to restore some 10-year old data from our tape archive. Luckily, the tapes were … Continue reading →

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CPU Design for Tinkerers

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Steven Golden

One of the biggest steps in the history of computing was the integration of an entire CPU on a single chip. The so born microprocessor made the microcomputer possible, which would eventually bring affordable personal computing to the masses. This … Continue reading →

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On Unicode

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Steven Golden

Unicode, particularly Unicode in UTF-8 encoding, is the most widely used character encoding today. It has solved one of the most annoying compatibility problems of the 1980s. Everyone is using it. Yet its details are still often misunderstood. Back in … Continue reading →

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Truly Old-School Computing

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Steven Golden

My very first computing experience was tinkering around with a friend’s Sinclair ZX81. That was around 1985, I believe. In a moment of nostalgia, I recently tried out a ZX81 emulator found on the Web: it made me re-live some … Continue reading →

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The Basic Unified Process

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Steven Golden

I have never worked on a large software team – in fact, most projects that I have been involved with, did not have more than two participants. Still, getting some insight into software development on a larger scale seems like … Continue reading →

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