Prof Abdul Razzaq Memon- Credit for basic concepts of computer design and engineering

زرا عمر رفتہ کو آواز دینا-

With our teacher Dr Abdul Razzaq Memon at VCs Workshop at Movenpick! He is currently VC of Preston University. He is 77 now and I crossed 60 recently.
He was chairperson of Electronic Engineering Department at DCET during 1980s.

October 25, 2022 pic 

He taught us (80-85 batch) one of our most memorable course in 1983-84 in which we studied Malvino's SAP, as Simple as Possible Computer and constructed it through discrete chips and components. The book was simple and extremely readable and the design went step by step using a 4-bit design, and 555 based clock and using chips available in the market. Study Aid Project of fellow students also distributed a kit containing all the components for about a thousand rupees. This kit was used to assemble and I also learned that some more sophisticated chip can be used to simplify the design and execution of the circuit. But, the whole point of the book was to enable the students to learn step by step the entire instruction cycle. From fetch to execute. The beauty of the book and the project was that one could step through each part of the fetch cycle and the execute cycle and could physically see through the tester the sequences of the 1s and 0s moving from one register to another to buffer and then through all the steps. 

 

This laid the foundation for our final year project.   
He also took our Final Year Project viva. In this project we integrated a microcontroller (Z80 based Micro-Professor, with hex input keys and hex 6 character dispkay) with full Ascii keyboard and TV monitor. We worked day and night for reenginnering the Micro-Professor and then extensively modifying the micro assembler to break( NMI non mask able interrupts) and jump to our routines during key input and routines during output displays. The experience of this project was the stepping stone for my scholarship and UT Austin MS, PhD. Will record it in a video.