Computer Hardware Design Projects for Undergraduate Students

A laboratory-based approach is described for making a diversified set of computer hardware design projects available to large groups of undergraduate students at a modest cost. Memory and input/output functions are provided as common resources to groups of students using either minicomputer or microcomputer systems. These computer systems also serve vital functions of providing interactive operating and testing aids to students, such as issuing prompts for actions by the students, loading internal secondary and external primary main memories, postmortem dumping of main memory, diagnosing input/output errors, and, in some cases, loading an external control memory. Students connect to this common-resource computer system via a programmable bidirectional parallel interface that was designed for the purpose of implementing communications between computing machines in a flexible and low-cost manner.