Scenes (and full video!) from my “How Computers Work Under the Hood” presentation

Back in June, I posed a question on this blog: Would you like to know how computers REALLY work “under the hood?” Tampa Devs, a very active nonprofit with a mission to support the local developer community though this would be a good presentation topic. On Wednesday, I gave that presentation to this crowd:

I started by telling the attendees that while knowing about microprocessors and assembly language isn’t absolutely necessary to function in a lot of developer and tech jobs today, there’s value in that knowledge:

I talked about transistors…

…made note of the fact that it was the 52nd birthday of the commercial microprocessor…

…introduced the 6502…

…got deeper into its inner workings…

…and then we dove into 6502 assembly language programming!

Tampa Devs recorded the entire thing, and you can watch it here:

All the material from the presentation is available online:

• Here are my slides,
• here are the notes for the assembly language programming exercises,
• and here’s the 6502 assembler/simulator that I used to do the programming demos.

My thanks to:

• Tampa Devs for inviting me to speak at their meetup — it’s always an honor and a pleasure to work with a group that contributes so much to the Tampa Bay tech scene!
• Kforce for providing the venue, which I like to say has “the comfiest meetup chairs in Tampa Bay.”
• Civo for sponsoring the pizza, sodas, and water for the attendees, and taking such an interest in supporting the Tampa Bay tech scene.