Computer architecture was once considered a boring subject, but not anymore! With Moore's Law slowing to a crawl, computing hardware is experiencing a new golden age. This fun, informative book takes a look at the past to offer inspiration for the radical designs of tomorrow, tracing the development of modern systems from Stone Age tallies and Babbage's engines, to present-day cloud architectures, quantum computers, and big data parallelization. Based on author Charles Fox's award-winning university-level computer-architecture course, it covers the inner workings of the computer, from circuits to CPUs to memory and beyond. Fresh ideas are introduced using concepts from history, music, gaming and retro computing, and other interesting areas of study. In addition, practical computer exercises are provided in every chapter, such as building a CPU from digital logic, and programming machines like the Commodore 64, x86 and RISC-V. By the end, you'll learn all of the hardware requirements o