We begin our exploration of computing with a high-level view of the structure of a computer—namely, computer architecture. As with many topics in this book, there are shelves of books on computing, so our approach is far from comprehensive. However, we will consider the most relevant ideas for our real-time computing purposes and point to places to begin exploring the wider literature if you wish.
Computer architectures are models of the structure of a computer system, often ignoring details of the implementation. Understanding a computer at this level is indispensable for designing systems with real-time computers. Real-time programming involves the computer architecture much more than conventional programming does. As noted in section 0.4, this is one reason why most real-time programs are written in the C programming language, which gives low-level access to the memory and registers of the computer hardware.
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