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

Oh, man.

Oh, my.

And the world. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast episode 95, How Computers Work Part 5, assembly language and the operating system.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to look at how we build more complex programs, building upon the basis of simple instructions set up in the instruction set architecture that we talked about in the previous episode.

So in doing so, we'll talk about the assembly language, which is a symbolic representation of machine code.

And I'll also talk about the operating system, which is just once before managing multiple programs running on the system at once.

Also, I'll discuss how the operating system interfaces with the hardware to perform input and output,

which is obviously a very important aspect of interacting with a computer.

Before we get to that, though, I'm going to talk a little bit about

some of the performance improvements that can be implemented to improve the performance of processor

architectures that I discussed in the previous episode.

So the recommended pre-listing for this episode is, unsurprisingly, the previous one,

part four of our How Computers Work series.

And again, strongly recommend that because a lot of what I talk about here won't make sense without that background.

So, that being said, let's begin and talk about some of the improvements that we can use to improve the performance of our processor architecture.

So in the previous episode, in discussing processor architecture, I only talked about the absolute basics that you need to get a processor to work that's true and complete and capable of running very basic programs.

And capable of running in principle any program, but in practice it would be so slow that it would run only fairly basic programs well.

So in this section, I want to talk about some of the improvements that have been made and alterations and additions to the process architectures

over the decades in order to increase their performance. And specifically I'm going to talk

about pipelining, cache memory, branch prediction, out of order execution and parallel

...