492: Octopus Army

Nathan Jones chatted with us about his proposal for a computer architecture book based on a 4-bit computer.

Nathan found the 4-bit computer in the Hackaday SuperCon 2022 badge and was amazed by some of the ideas that folks implemented (see SuperCon Badge Hacking Awards Ceremony).

Nathan spoke at Hackaday SuperCon 2023 on the processor architecture, highlighting some of his ideas for a book. If you'd like to try your hand at the badge, find it on Nathan's Voja4 Tindie page.

Nathan also spoke recently at the Embedded Online Conference (Building a Simple CLI, OOP in C, and The Power of a Look-up Table) and the Teardown Conference (Making Your Own MCU Boards and Building a Simple CLI).

If you have an idea you'd like to propose, check out O'Reilly's proposal for a book or class. While you may not go with them, the proposal is a good place to get all of your ideas down.

We mentioned a few other computer architecture books as competitors for Nathan's proposed book:

• Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson

• Introduction to Computing Systems: From bits & gates to C & beyond by Yale N. Patt and Sanjay J. Patel

• The Elements of Computing Systems, by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (MIT Press) with supporting material and simulator on nand2tetris.

Nathan also did a survey of the Embedded Slack community. You can gain access by becoming a Patreon or Kofi supporter.

Transcript