The aim of this course is two-fold:

• to familiarize the student with concepts relevant to the design of actual computers and
• to introduce the concepts of networks and distributed systems.

The course will cover mainly the hardware aspects of the topics stated above. We will describe various components that are combined in integrated circuits, such as gates, shift registers, adders, subtractors, multipliers, etc. We will discuss memory devices, memory addressing and microprocessor architecture. Further, the main components of a network, network topology and client-server architecture, will be discussed, with particular emphasis on the ways of realizing simple networks as well as distributed network systems.