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Answer:

Hopefully your machine language program ran successfully and did not crash the system.

If it did crash, check that every instruction is one of the eight bit patterns in the table.


Machine Language Program

This is, of course, a silly example. Actual processors have many more machine instructions and the instructions are much more detailed. A typical processor has a thousand or more different machine instructions. Those instructions do not directly affect any output device (such as our light bulb.)

Even the simplest controller has much more memory. But the essential ideas of the example are these:

In days long ago, the ones and zeros of a machine language program were entered into main memory by flipping switches on the front panel of a computer. The on-or-off state of each bit was displayed by lights. You may have seen this in old science fiction movies. These days there are more convenient ways to put ones and zeros into main memory. But the idea is still the same: machine instructions are patterns of ones and zeros, and data are patterns of ones and zeros.


QUESTION 5:

Is it obvious what each machine instruction in our example means? That is, is it obvious what operation "00100000" calls for?


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