I stopped by Tom Jennings’ lecture on computer hardware at Machine yesterday, which was worthwhile not so much for the description on assembly (sort of muddled), but for the tangents and historical bits.

For example, I had no idea that core memory was manufactured primarily by Filipino seamstresses… (actually, all the early memory types are pretty interesting. Like acoustic delay line memory. Crazy.)

Some things that I’ll have to follow up on myself: assembly programming in relation to advanced features (handling out-of-order execution, pipelining, parallel processing), and the historical development of synchronously clocked architectures.