Let's see him come up with IEEE floats on his own. Let's see him conceive of 2's compliment signed integers on his own. Let's see him come up with an assembler

Let's see him come up with IEEE floats on his own. Let's see him conceive of 2's compliment signed integers on his own. Let's see him come up with an assembler on his own. Without prior exposure to the concept.[1] You don't get Dijkstra's path finding algorithm with an ivory-tower attitude that doesn't care about the practicalities of implementation. At least as far as the assembler, well, that's something that anybody who is sick of hand-keying in machine code and patching up addresses will probably think of. As for the rest--well, modern CS folks (nor electrical engineers!) aren't coming up with 754 or 2's complement either.