// the find
geohot/fromthetransistor
From the Transistor to the Web Browser, a rough outline for a 12 week course
This is geohot's outline for a 12-week self-taught curriculum that builds a computer from an FPGA-simulated CPU up through a C compiler, a Unix-like OS, a TCP stack, and a text browser. It's for someone who already codes and wants to fill in the gap between 'writes Python' and 'understands what a syscall actually does', not a beginner course.
The scope is genuinely coherent, not just a reading list — each stage's output (assembler, linker, bootrom, MMU) is the direct input to the next, so you can't fake your way through a layer. Concrete line-count estimates per module (e.g. 'Building a C compiler(Haskell, 2000)') give a real sense of effort instead of vague week-by-week fluff. Using Verilator for FPGA emulation is a smart call that removes the barrier of needing actual hardware for most of the course.
This is only a README — the directory tree is literally just README.md, there's no code, no lecture material, no exercises, nothing to actually follow. Last push was 2021-10-12 and it reads like a design doc that was never executed as a real course (the outline itself admits things like 'maybe' and 'I think' throughout). Section 7 on physical FPGA board bringup is aspirational hand-waving ('we provide a toaster oven') with no actual hardware design files. If you're looking for something to work through this weekend, this gives you zero of the actual 6000+ lines of code it promises.