I just found “The Toaster Project“, a Royal College of Art project where Thomas Twaites built a simple toaster from scratch. Really from scratch, going all they way back to iron ore and raw petroleum. In the process, he had to smelt ore, create plastic from petroleum, etc. It is a very interesting observation about the immense industrial complexity behind the very simple everyday items of our lives. I also think it has something to tell us computer scientists about abstraction.
Tag: abstraction levels
I Want One… Trillion Instructions…
There is an eternal debate going on in virtual platform land over what the right kind of abstraction is for each job. Depending on background, people favor different levels. For those with a hardware background, more details tend to be the comfort zone, while for those with a software background like myself, we are quite comfortable with less details. I recently did some experiments about the use of quite low levels of hardware modeling details for early architecture exploration and system specification.