PART A · VOLUME 1

The Physical World

Rock, electricity, silicon, transistors, logic and memory. Everything a computer is made of, before any software exists.

1. The Whole Machine in One Look 2. Electricity - The Thing That Does All The Work 3. From Sand to Silicon - Rock, Furnace, Wafer, Fab 4. The Transistor - The Switch That Built The World 5. Logic Gates and Arithmetic - How Switches Learn to Add 6. How a Machine Remembers - Latches, Clocks and Memory Cells

CHAPTERS IN THIS PART

1. The Whole Machine in One Look

You will be able to say what a computer actually is, with nothing magical left in it. You will name the five parts every computer has ever had, and find them in a 1945 ma...

2. Electricity - The Thing That Does All The Work

You will be able to say what electricity is, in terms of atoms and the particles inside them. You will be able to explain voltage, current and resistance, and do sums wit...

3. From Sand to Silicon - Rock, Furnace, Wafer, Fab

You will be able to say where the silicon in a chip comes from, naming the You will be able to explain why 99 percent pure is useless here....

4. The Transistor - The Switch That Built The World

You will be able to say what a transistor is, in one sentence, without You will understand doping: how a few foreign atoms turn silicon from a...

5. Logic Gates and Arithmetic - How Switches Learn to Add

You will be able to explain how a rule about true and false became a rule You will be able to draw a CMOS inverter, a NAND gate and a NOR gate from...

6. How a Machine Remembers - Latches, Clocks and Memory Cells

You will explain why a plain logic gate cannot remember anything. You will draw an SR latch and say what all four input pairs do....