101–110 of 157 posts
It covers the rise of the PC up until the early 90s and has interviews of everybody including Bill Gates Steve Jobs Larry Ellison etc. etc.… It’s pretty amazing.
Learn about the CDC 6600 and the architecture compared with top IBM 360 computers. Learn about Cray I.
Cray was the builder of the fastest computers in the world for a long time. Always sold early machines of each model to scientific govt labs and NSA. The first 6600s were delivered to Livermore and Los Alamos (Wikipedia CDC 6600).
With less than 30 people Cray built a computer (the 6600) about 2 times faster than anything IBM with its massive budget could build. There is a famous letter by IBM's Chief Watson Jr. about this fact at The Computer History Museum website.
When IBM used ICs for the 360's, Cray still used transistors for the CDC 6600. His reasoning is great.
If you can manage a day trip to Cambridge (about an hour from London), you should visit the excellent Museum of Computing History http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is also excellent.
I'd also add the Information Age gallery at the Science Museum in London, which covers from the telegraph to Arm and the modern day, its aimed at a more mainstream audience than Bletchley but is free and well worth a look.
Steven Levy's Hackers is a foundational work of the history of computing. Levy spends a lot of time on the MIT hackers of the 1960s and 1970s, the group that hatched Lisp, Richard Stallman and the free software movement, and also a lot of time on the Bay Area hackers that kick-started the microcomputer revolution. Certainly it's not a comprehensive guide to the full range of computing history, but it's an important a…
There are also several good museums dedicated to the subject. I used to work for the national museum of computing at bletchley park in the UK, and there they have a lot of good exhibits that teach basics of how computers and networking works and has evolved over the years. Another good approach one can take to learn is starting with a simple system with well-defined rules, and making a simple computer out of it. Many…
I second Bletchley. Consider it your obligatory pilgrimage as a computing professional.
I'm not at all sure that learning about computer history and learning about how computers work are the same thing. For example, looking at early microprocessors would give you the idea that instruction set architectures are completely random when in fact their designers were faced with a limited transistor budget and very short development times. Often, microprocessors were offered as a replacement for discrete logic…
Lookup tables are a good way to do fast arithmetic. Some IEEE 754 implementations still use them - usually with interpolation - for certain functions. That aside - hardware technologies, storage systems, ISAs, engineering enhancements (like paging, caches, microcode, and others), operating systems, market segmentation (micro, mini, super, etc), languages, and compiler theory all have their own separate histories. You…
As for lookup tables, I won't say anything bad about them in general. That said, if you pressed the Memory Clear button on a 1620 console, it would wipe the addition and multiplication tables, meaning you couldn't even load a program until you had manually entered replacement values. This was a Dumb Idea :).
Ben Eater's Youtube series "Building an 8-bit Breadboard Computer" is a really good introduction to the lowest levels of how a computer works: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2... I recommended it to my daughter when she was taking a class in R and asked "But how does the COMPUTER know what to do?"
Ben Eater is amazing, but his series in my very humble opinion isn't the best answer to this question. I found the emphasis on the breadboard and the particulars of physical implementation getting in the way of a clean pedagogical introduction to logic circuits as a DAG of abstract computational elements implementing function from {0,1}^n -> {0,1}^m (which we then implement with real circuits in whatever medium and form we choose), it's very "DIY" and maker-oriented in nature. This doesn't negate it's status as a masterpiece of educational vlogs, I just feel it leaves a first-time learner hanging on some very important questions.
The single best answer I have ever seen to this question is the outstanding The Elements Of Computing Systems[1], better known as the NandToTetris course[2][3]. You literally start with Nand and build a computer, an assembler, a VM, a compiler, a simple runtime library, and - finally - Tetris running on top of all that. It's one of the best introductions to computers and computer science I have ever seen in my life, at once a textbook and a work of science communication. It comes with it's own software suit[4], and the first 4 chapters of the book (from Nand to a fully functional computer capable of running machine code) are gamified in [5].
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrDd_kMiAuNmSb-CKWQqq...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrDd_kMiAuNmllp9vuPqC...