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The Foundation

  1. 01The Foundation
  2. 02Choose your theme
  3. 03What just happened?
  4. 04You didn't need to see it
  5. 05Abstractions
  6. 06Abstractions are everywhere
  7. 07But what if you want to know?
  8. 08Here's the thing
  9. 09The human way
  10. 10Standing on the shoulders of giants
  11. 11Layers of work
  12. 12Computers are no different
  13. 13What is a computer, really?
  14. 14A machine that follows instructions
  15. 15Transistors
  16. 16How many?
  17. 17Binary
  18. 18Two Bits
  19. 19Add another switch
  20. 20What about characters?
  21. 21The agreement, in action.
  22. 22Just bits
  23. 23The signature
  24. 24Anything
  25. 25Before electricity
  26. 26Punch cards
  27. 27Reading the card
  28. 28ENIAC
  29. 29The components
  30. 30A processor
  31. 31Central Processing Unit (CPU)
  32. 32Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
  33. 33Thousands at Once
  34. 34Random Access Memory (RAM)
  35. 35Storage
  36. 36Opening an app
  37. 37An analogy
  38. 38All of it, bits
  39. 39Reinforce your understanding
  40. 40Quiz: transistor
  41. 41Question: Abstraction
  42. 42Quiz: Binary
  43. 43Quiz: answer
  44. 44Full circle
  45. 45Want to go deeper?
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What about characters?

8 bits gives you 256 different combinations. This is called a byte.
A byte is enough to represent every letter, every number, and every punctuation mark on your keyboard.

Years back, people agreed on a standard called ASCII: combination 65 would mean the letter A. Combination 66 would mean B. And so on.

Today, computers use bigger standards like Unicode so they can handle far more than English. But the idea is the same: numbers become characters because people agree on a shared list.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. unicode.org
  2. 2. loc.gov
Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. unicode.org
  2. 2. loc.gov