Course: How Computers Work: Demystifying Computation

These days Simon Long is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Raspberry Pi, but in the past he worked in contract research and development and sometimes found himself having to …

This is the ‘little man computer’, or LMC. It’s an instructional model of a computer, created in around 1965. It models a simple Von Neumann architecture, with all the basic …

Now let’s look at how the CPU can perform calculations, using a process known as the Fetch Decode Execute cycle. Here we have a representation of a CPU and RAM. …

Now that you know how logic gates can be used to perform calculations and to store data, let’s have look at how this all fits together to make a computer. …

Before we go any further into looking at how a computer processor works, we need to look at how a computer can store data. Above is a diagram of a …

Before we proceed any further, let us have a quick look at the naming system that is commonly used when talking about binary numbers and data. You already know that …

In this step we’re going to recap some of the logic gates we have already met, and look at all the other gates. You should be familiar by now with …

In this step, we’re going to have a look at how transistors can be combined together to form what are called logic gates, and in particular we’ll look at the …

In a previous step you learned that we can perform calculations using 1s and 0s, and that the state of a switch can be used to represent a 1 or …

Now let’s have a look at why computers use binary anyway. Let’s start by thinking about the most simple use case: computers need to store data. Now if a computer …

In this step we’re going to look at working with binary. As you saw in a previous step, a Turing machine is capable of operating using only two symbols – …

When I used to teach secondary school science, I would pepper my lessons with various stories and anecdotes that were relevant to the lesson. For instance, when I was teaching …

While Babbage and Lovelace can be considered the parents of computers and programming, Alan Turing is often called the father of Computer Science. During the war effort, Turing worked on …

In this step, we’re going to look at two of the earliest pioneers of Computer Science: Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. You’ll learn about their pioneering work in trying to …

In this step we’re going to look at what we mean by the term Computer, and try to come up with a definition for what a computer actually is. It …