ECE421 T, Operating Systems, Spring 2025
Tue & Thurs from 5:05 to 6:20 p.m. in MM 202

The Book

Documentation

Potentially useful source code

Assistance

Assignments

1 due: Thursday 22nd January Five little programs to get used to BCPL.
2 due: Thursday 5th February A small library of string functions.

Read the Important Rules link above.
Submit assignments (code + sample run(s)) through blackboard (under Assignments) - THIS SHOULD CHANGE SOON.
Submissions must be clearly readable word documents.
Capture your code as text, not an image: cat, copy, paste.

PC log in - use Putty or your own preferred SSH app. OR mac users: start the terminal app, windows users: start powershell, then type the command
ssh username@rabbit.eng.miami.edu and type your password when prompted.
Windows users beware: you can't use ctrl-V in pico, but page up and page down will do the job.
New advance: windows' terminal app now does an adequate job and is used the same way as the mac version.

Class History

Class 1 - Tue 13-1-2026    A very slight introduction and two motivating mysteries.
Starting BCPL, documentation sections 1 to 13 and 15.
Class 2 - Thur 15-1-2026 Got up to section 38, nearly all done.
Class 3 - Tue 20-1-2026 Extracting and inserting sub-word-length bit sequences,
Frame pointers and how stack frames are organised,
Debugging options and other tricks under our virtual machine.
Class 4 - Thur 22-1-2026 String operations. This link explains what the next four links lead to,
They are two different implementations of the essential parts of the string and "filestring"
objects we had by the end of class, but much tidier than anything I could have written on the board.
strings_one.b, stringstream_one.b, strings_two.b, stringstream_two.b.
Class 5 - Tue 27-1-2026 (look briefly at the tidied strings_two and stringstream_two first)
Taming an unfortunate but common situation: keyboard input, stringstream input.
Design of a trivial and very unhelpful file system.
Class 6 - Thur 29-1-2026 The implementation of file system version 0.
FAT-16, a very bad idea.
Class 7 - Tue 3-2-2026
Class 8 - Thur 5-2-2026
Class 9 - Tue 10-2-2026
Class 10 - Thur 12-2-2026
Class 11 - Tue 17-2-2026
Class 12 - Thur 19-2-2026
Class 13 - Tue 24-2-2026
Class 14 - Thur 26-2-2026
Class 15 - Tue 3-3-2026
Class 16 - Thur 5-3-2026
Break 9th to 13th
Class 17 - Tue 17-3-2026
Class 18 - Thur 19-3-2026
Class 19 - Tue 24-3-2026
Class 20 - Thur 26-3-2026
Class 21 - Tue 31-3-2026
Class 22 - Thur 2-4-2026
Class 23 - Tue 7-4-2026
Class 24 - Thur 9-4-2026
Class 25 - Tue 14-4-2026
Class 26 - Thur 16-4-2026
Class 27 - Tue 21-4-2026
Class 28 - Thur 23-4-2026