Independent Studies | University of Waterloo

Charles Eric LaForest This page was last reviewed on February 1, 2010

Photo by Sean M Puckett

I want to understand computers from the silicon up to the user interface. I want to make better and beautiful machines, like starships and samurai, not Buicks and bureaucracies. I want to make it possible again for two hairy dropouts named "Steve" to homebrew something insanely great in their garage.

I had a hunch that little-known second-generation of stack computers such as the NOVIX NC4016 and the MuP21 were part of the answer, but they aren't in any engineering textbook and you can't buy one at the store.

So under the aegis of Independent Studies, I taught myself the architecture of these machines, invented software for them from scratch, and took ECE classes to learn how to build them. I found new interests as I went such as asynchronous circuits, virtual machines, and programming languages.

I graduated from IS in April of 2007. And yet, once my thesis was done, with all its arguments and designs and simulations, I felt I had just begun to truly grasp the problem. I'll be continuing this quest for elegant computers during my graduate studies at the Universityof Toronto.

You can read Eric's thesis in PDF format here: Second-Generation Stack Computer Architecture

Eric's talk about Stack Computers to the Computer Science Club was covered at the popular computing website SlashDot August 2006. The video of his talk was downloaded over 50,000 times within a week, making it the most popular video hosted by the CSC at that time.

In 2009, Eric was accepted in to the Electrical and Computering Engineering PhD program at the University of Toronto.

http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~laforest/

Eric also had the distinction to appear as a contestant on the Discovery Channel's Qubit, aired starting Saturday July 4, 2009.

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