The Simplified Instructional Computer (or SIC) was thought up by Leland L. Beck, a professor at San Diego State University, in his book System Software: An Introduction to Systems Programming (ISBN: 9780201423006).
In contrast to modern computer architectures, The SIC architecture is very basic, which makes it perfect for teaching students about systems programming. It also means that creating a simple simulator or assembler for the architecture is very easy, as is demonstrated by the projects in this repository.
There exist two version of the SIC architecture, the basic SIC and SIC/XE or SIC eXtended Edition. A later chapter will explain the difference between the two, but in general SIC/XE is a beefed up version of SIC, with more memory, more registers, floating point numbers and more addressing modes, all while being backwards compatible with the basic SIC.