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Computers

Tricking electrons to work for us.

Resources​

  • The Secret Life of Programs
    • A free book that explains how computers work starting from bits
  • Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
    • A book that explains how computers work from the ground up
  • NAND to Tetris Course
    • A course to understand how a computer works
    • Using NAND gates to build a programming language that can build the game Tetris
    • NAND gates, boolean logic, machine language, computer architecture, assembly language, virtual machine, high-level language, compiler, operating system
  • A Functional Introduction to Computer Science
    • Various districts of Computer Science, not just programming, facilitated with a functional programming language called Racket
    • Part I: syntax & semantics, structures, lists, functional abstraction, efficient representations, trees, recursion, and interpreters
    • Part II: imperative programming languages, instruction set, implementing functional languages, control, and continuations

Sites​

News/forums/communities:

  • TLDR Newsletter — Daily newsletter on tech news
  • Hacker News — News and articles about computers, programming, startups, etc.
    • Instead of checking it regularly, can try the Hacker News Letter
    • At first, I was not used to the layout, but soon appreciate the clean and minimal display after subscribing to the newsletter
  • Lobsters — similar to hacker news, more focused on programming
  • Internet in a box (FAQ) (HN)
    • An awesome project to put the Internet into a box for places that are not connected to the Internet
  • The IBM Mainframe: How it Runs and Why it Survives
    • Redundancy and partitioning, CPU (Telum), OS (Z/OS), files qualifiers, software (Job Control Language, COBOL, CICS)
    • Why mainframe survives? Customer "lock-in". The important niche of high-volume and business-critical data processing.
  • Everything I know about floppy disks (HN)
    • The mechanisms, flux transitions, and comparison of different formats
    • Different specs, properties and features of different floppy disks
  • New Breakthrough Brings Matrix Multiplication Closer to Ideal
    • Includes brief explanation of breakthrough over the past 50 years from n^3 to ~n^2.3715
  • What Computers Cannot Do: The Consequences of Turing-Completeness
  • CS 191 "Classics of Computer Science" | Harvard

    This course examines papers every computer scientist should have read, from the 1930s to the present. It is meant to be a synthesizing experience for advanced students in computer science: a way for them to see the field as a whole, not through a survey, but by reliving the experience of its creation. The idea is to create a unified view of the field of computer science, for students who already know something about it, by replaying its entire evolution at an accelerated frame rate.

  • Computer History Museum Exhibitions
    • A collection of exhibits in the Computer History Museum
    • The presentations in the museum are better organized than these web pages
    • But if you have been to the museum, these pages are a good reference to revisit the exhibits

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