Instructions & Programs: Crash Course Computer Science

Today we’re going to take our first baby steps from hardware into software! Using that CPU we built last episode we’re going to run some instructions and walk you through how a program operates on the machine level. We'll show you how different programs can be used to perform different tasks, and how software can unlock new capabilities that aren't built into the hardware. This episode, like the last is pretty complicated, but don’t worry - as we move forward into programming the idea of opcodes, addresses, and registers at this machine level will be abstracted away like many of the concepts in this series.