Creating a Microcomputer Facility

A relatively inexpensive set of hardware, software, and experiments used in conjunction with a time-sharing computer system for the instruction of undergraduate and graduate students in computer engineering and computer science is described. The hardware is a modular computer station consisting of standard building blocks of a microcomputer system such as CPU, memory, and I/O. The software of the system is divided between that resident in the time-sharing system and that resident in the microcomputer. The microcomputer facility was designed to be inexpensive by using the capability of a time-sharing computer usually found at an academic institution. The facility has the capability of accomodating large groups of students and a variety of different microprocessors.