nand2tetris

• Build a Modern Computer from First Principles
• Don’t worry about the “how”[^1], only about the “what”¹

The goal of the course is to build an understanding of how computing and software works, starting from the bottom up, with Nand gates^3.

Notes

In 0.2 they mentioned that the HACK computer could run any type of program you can imagine, but then proceed to list just games.

[assembly], it’s a very low level language, very inconvenient

Logic

A gate is a logic operation. Gates can be combined into boolean expressions. These can often be manipulated and reduced. Another way to simplify an expression is by looking at its truth-table and see if there is a simpler expression for it.

NOT(NOT(x) AND NOT(x OR y)) = x OR y

Creating the function from the truth-table is at the heart of computer design. You do that by going through each row of the truth-table where the result is 1 and figure out a function for this row only. Then you join all of these function by OR and than reduce that construct. Any boolean function can be represented by AND, OR, and NOT … or even just AND and NOT. Hence the NAND gate :D

Words…

• boolean identities
• commutative/associative/distributive laws
• De Morgan Laws…

Gates

• NOT (unary), flips value
• AND, only two 1 = 1
• OR, either is 1 = 1
• NAND, either is 0 = 1

See also

• [[Project-Centered Course) | Coursera](https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer|Build a Modern Computer from First Principles: From Nand to Tetris (Project-Centered Course) | Coursera]]
• Home | nand2tetris

^1

Footnotes

1. abstraction: what the programming language promises to do ↩