The postroom computer: teaching introductory undergraduate computer architecture

Undergraduate students often experience difficulty in understanding the basic principles of low level computer operations in introductory courses to computer architectures when these are taught using actual low level programming languages. This is not due to any inherent complexity of the concepts but rather a consequence of assembly language specific details and the need to introduce many concepts simultaneously, such as, for example, data representation, addressing modes and primitive I/O. This paper describes the Postroom Computer, a low level language simulator that not only provides a simple low level language, suitable as an introduction to assembly language programming, but also allows computer architecture concepts to be introduced in an incremental fashion.