How Computers Work By Roger Young

Just now i finished reading How Computers Work By Roger Young.

There is a free electronic copy available at this site

Nice book written by Roger Young.

I need to admit that i have understood very little and need to take help of wikipedia for making me refresh fundamentals.

I wanted to share few important points i found from this book.

1) A power wire is a wire connected directly to the top of the battery. A ground wire is a wire connected directly to the bottom of the battery. Any electrical machine is called a circuit.

2) An electromagnet is a coil of (plastic coated) wire. An electromagnet becomes magnetic when electricity goes through it, just as a light bulb glows when electricity goes through the light bulb.

The wire that makes up the coil of wire that is the electromagnet has two ends (connections). There is also a ‘ground wire’ from the other connection of the electromagnet back to the bottom of the battery.

3) A key and the electromagnet that controls it are, together, called a relay. A computer is almost entirely made up of a lot of relays (today, transistors) connected by wires.Today, transistors are used instead of relays for lower cost and greater speed.

4) A key is called ‘closed’ when electricity can flow through it from a wire on its left to a wire on its right.

A key is called ‘open’ when electricity can’t flow through it from a wire on the left to a wire on the right.

5) Any piece of wire that is powered is said to have value ‘1.’
Any piece of wire that is not powered is said to have value ‘0.’

6) A good explanation of Logic Gates is available in wikipedia

7) A good explanation of ROM and RAM is available in wikipedia

8) A Central Processing Unit (CPU), or sometimes just called processor, is a description of a class of logic machines that can execute computer programs.More explain in wikipedia.

Hope you enjoy reading the book.

About the Author

Roger Stephen Young lives in Pennsylvania and graduated from The Pennsylvania State University in 1981 where he majored in physics and was interested in transistors. He went to the California State University at Fullerton and worked on a Master's degree in electrical engineering for two years but didn't complete it because he got a job at Texas Instruments before finishing.