Knowledge: A little light expels much darkness _ Bahya ibn Paquda, Duties of the Heart During the early 1970s digital computer techniques concentrated on the computational and interfacing aspects of digital systems and the decade began as the age of both the mainframe computer and the minicomputer. Engineers and system designers needed to know the fundamentals of computer operation and how the practical limitations of the architectures of the day, the memory size, cost and performance could be overcome; it was for this reason that this book was first written. By 1980 the microprocessor...

This book presents as formal papers nearly all of the lectures given at the NATO advanced summer institute on Computer Architecture held at St. Raphael, France from September 12th - 24th 1976. It was not possible to include an important paper by G. Amdahl on the 470V6 System, nor papers by Mde. A. Recoque on distributed processing, Messrs. A. Maison and G. Debruyne on LSI technology, and K. Bowden. Computer architecture is a very diverse and expanding subject, consequently it was decided to limit the scope of the School to five main subject areas. These were: specific computer architectures,...