Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast episode 91. How Computers

Work Part 1. What is a computer? I'm your host, James Fodor. So, this is the first

in what I anticipate will be a series of six episodes discussing the key principles behind how

modern computers work. This is a series I've been working

over quite some time, and I'm really happy it's finally all come together. So in this series of

episodes, we're going to be looking at how computers work from a reductionistic level,

building up to higher and higher levels of complexity. So in this episode, I'll start by talking about the theory of computation and a little bit about the history of computers, what is a computer, and some of the key principles of computer organization.

In the next episode, we'll look at how numbers are stored in a computer using binary coding, and we'll talk about the principles underlying semiconductors and how they're used to produce transistors.

In the third episode, we'll look at how transistors are used to build logic gates, and how logic gates then are used to build various logic components, which are able to carry out operations inlean Algebra that are used in making computer operations.

In part four, we'll look at the processor architecture and talk about the von Neumann architecture,

how the processor is put together from underlying logic components,

and we'll also talk about the instruction set architecture, which is a set of operations, that essentially defines the basic things that a computer can do.

In part five, we'll talk about machine code and how that is assembled from a higher abstraction called assembly language.

We'll talk about some performance improvements that can be made to help processes run faster, and we'll talk a bit about the underlying principles of the operating

system and how input and output works and how memory is managed by the operating system.

In the sixth and final part of the series, we'll talk about higher-level programming languages,

a little bit about how compilation works, and give

an example of how you might implement a simple game in a higher level programming language

to give you a sense of that. And also we'll sort of summarize and put together everything

that we've talked about in the six episodes. So hopefully you find this interesting and informative.

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