One day, my daughter read a book, Ada’s Algorithm, for her English class, and we had lots of discussions about Ada’s actual contributions to the field of computer science.
He work described the concept of an algorithm, which was the first computer “code”, but to render her ideas, I decided that I might create a simulator. Since I’m not knowledgeable on Babbage’s original engines, I thought the simulator could resemble the 6502 processor that I fell in love with as a boy.
This simulator is a complete web application and requires no
server-side code or framework. It is written CoffeeScript, and the CPU
instructions should be simple enough to understand (the parser code in
the hardware.coffee file makes heavy use of LoDash’s reduce
function, and may be more difficult to follow).
Its use, however, is a very simple, controlled “central processing unit” that could be used to teach students the underlying technology of all computer systems… The teaching part is what I’m currently working on.
If you would like to host this project, clone this repository to some directory available on your web server. Some files are not part of this repository, and should be easily downloaded:
- LoDash
js/lodash.js- JS-Cookie
js/js.cookie.js- jQuery UI
ui/jquery-ui.js- Apple’s Bitmapped Font
PrintChar21.ttf(see this page)- Motter Tektura Font
fonts/mottertektura.tff
That should do ’er.
Copyright 2015, Howard Abrams
This code is licensed on the GPL, but I may change that this weekend. ;-)