CODE: The hidden language of computer hardware and software

by Charles Petzold

One of my favorite authors. Charles Petzold does a great job explaining how computers work from first principles starting with electricity, while giving plenty of historical context to how things evolved in the digital world. An amazing book and highly recommended. (Check the second edition)

📚 Chapter 28 of 28100% complete

StartNow

What a fun read! Definitely a book I would recommend to others, especially new comers to the field. Will prepare the verdict and publish it in the next few days.

I definitely want to play with FORTRAN and COBOL at some point soon.

I feel like the value of the book lies mostly in how Charles provides historical context for the evolution of the digital world and digital information in general. But, suddenly shifting the focus to a few chapters where things become extremly technical and dry feels, to me, a step in the wrong direction. Will share more once I release the final verdict of this book.

Lots of discussions about units, KB and MB, metric systems and how 1 KB isn't really 1000 bytes and blah blah blah... Yet not a single mention of KiB, MiB, GiB, etc. Pourquoi Mr. Petzold?

Didn't know 'Ram' was an animal!

It's fascinating how entirely new fields can emerge just from layers of abstraction stacked on top of each other: Physics -> Electrical Engineering -> Computer Engineering -> Computer Science

"The ENIAC used decimal numbers, but the designers of the EDVAC felt that the computer should use binary numbers internally" - I Love time traveling to historical moments like these!

The impact Bell labs had on the tech field is remarkable; transistors, Unix, C! Do we have such research labs nowadays? It feels like we live in a different world...

While ASCII and Unicode are topics I am comfortable with, seeing the evolution from a historical perspective is a true joy.

The bit by bit by bit chapter was very rich. Plenty of stories about the yellow ribbon, how barcodes and QR codes work, and more. Very interesting stuff.

Feels like the word 'Tele' appears almost every day (Telephone, Television, Telecommunication, Teletubbies!! ...), but never thought about checking the meaning of 'Tele'; Apparently it means 'distant'.

So Samuel Morse, the guy behind Morse code, is also the one who invented Telegraphs, which was the solution that replaced humans waving flags back in the old days when distant communication was needed.