Hi, my name is Shimon Schocken and I'm professor of computer science at
IDC Herzliya and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
>> And I'm Noam Nisan a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and at Microsoft Research.
>> We are very pleased to introduce Nand to Tetris Part I..
Anyone can pick this course,
including people who have no background in computer science or engineering.
The course consist of six weekly projects,
each focusing on building a different module of the computer's hardware.
In each project, you have you build a set of chips.
And for each such chip, we provide a complete chip specification.
And you then have to figure out how to build this functionality using
chips that you've built before.
But dont worry, you will have to do no soldering whatsoever.
Instead, you will build all the chips using your hardware simulator,
just like hardware engineers actually do in practice.
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In the first three projects of the course,
we start with the most elementary logic gate called NAND.
Using detailed project materials, we will guide you through the process of building
a chipset, a central processing unit and a memory unit.
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In the next two projects, you will integrate all the chips that you've built
before into a complete general purpose computer named HACK.
We will then connect the computer to a keyboard and a screen,
and poof, the computer will snap into action.
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In the last project in the course, we develop an assembler, which
enables writing programs using symbolic commands, rather than binary code.
This will allow us to use the HACK platform to run all sorts of cool programs
like Tetris and practically any other program that comes to your mind.
And that's it, from NAND to Tetris in six weeks.
The course requires about five to ten hours of work per week and
assumes no previous background in computer science or engineering.
All the knowledge necessary to take the course and
build a computer will be given in the course itself.
So if you wish to understand how computers work and how they're designed,
then sign up and let's build a computer.
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