I was entering the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a ...

The native language of the computer. In order for a program to run, it must be presented to the computer as binary-coded machine instructions that are specific to that CPU family. Although programmers ...

The microcontroller’s CPU reads program code from memory, one instruction at a time, decodes each instruction, and then executes it. All memory content—both program code and data—is in binary form: ...

Machine language is the fundamental standard for software compatibility, because it is the language the CPU understands. All programs presented to the computer for execution must be in the machine ...

A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet nearly ...