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
- awesome | GitHub @sindresorhus — A curated list of awesome lists, mainly related to computers
- YouTube: Computerphile — Computer science topics explained by computer scientists
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
Links
- 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.
Time
- YouTube: Network Time Protocol | Computerphile
- One round trip to estimate the round-trip time and server-processing time
- YouTube:
The Problem with Time & Timezones | Computerphile
- You thank the people who write the date time library and made it open source
- Time, technology and leaping seconds
- Google leap smear. Instead of doing a leap second NTP servers, it smear the second over a day
- Where does my computer get the time from?
- Network time protocol (NTP) ← GPS ← Schriever Space Force Base (SFB)
- Schriever SFB ← US Naval Observatory (USNO) Alternate Master CLock ← atomic clocks
- Atomic clocks ← Internatioal Earth Rotation Service (IERS) & International bureau of weights and measures in Paris (BIPM)
- Plus some history of defining a seconds with astronomical data
- List of 2024 Leap Day Bugs
- You think in 2024 it won't happen anymore, but it doesn't
- Programmer falsehood of time