Exploring Computer Systems

The Illustrated Guide to Understanding Computer Systems, Hardware & Networks

Kevin Wilson

• Publisher: Elluminet Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781911174967
• eBook ISBN: 9781913151232
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Hardware
• Index: Computer Science

Bits, bytes, logic, RAM, CPUs, hard drives and SSD drives. Master the geeky acronyms and simplify computer hardware & terminology with ease.

Computer hardware with all its technical jargon can be baffling, even for the moderately experienced user.

This book is ideal for a computing course, whether in high school, college or first degree.

Step-by-step, visual approach to help you quickly decode the jargon

Plenty of full color, illustrated screenshots and photographs to help you

Presented in an easy and simple to read format.

This book looks at

Computer fundamentals: logic gates, binary arithmetic, hexadecimal, and number base conversions

Data compression and encryption

Hardware components: CPUs, RAM, Hard Drives, Portable Drives, video cards memory cards, motherboards, and the BIOS

Inside the CPU, CPU architecture, instructions sets, and the fetch execute cycle

Data Storage: bits, bytes, kilo bytes, megabytes, giga bytes and tera bytes

Computer ports: VGA, HDMI, DVI, USB 2&3, FireWire, RJ45 ethernet, eSATA and more

Different types of computer: desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, hybrids and supercomputers

Operating systems: process management, memory management, file management

Computer Software: applications, system software

Computer peripherals: laser and inkjet printers Types of computer networks,

Network topologies, LANs, WANs, MANs, fibre optics and ethernet

WiFi and Cellular internet connections

The internet: email, the cloud, the world-wide web, and packet switching

IP Addressing, web servers, DNS servers and DHCP servers, TCP/IP model, OSI model

and more...

Techniques are illustrated step-by-step using full colorphotography and screen prints throughout, together with concise, easy to follow text from an established expert in the field, provide a comprehensive guide to computer systems.

Computer Fundamentals

A computer is a machine that can store and process data according to a sequence of instructions called a program.

At their most fundamental level, these machines can only process binary data: 1s and 0s.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at using the binary code to encode data, as well as binary arithmetic and number bases.

We’ll look at using logic gates to build simple circuits and how they form the building blocks for electronic devices, before moving onto the fetch execute cycle and instruction sets.

Let’s begin by taking a look at the binary code.

The Binary Code

The binary code uses 1s and 0s to encode computer instructions and data. RAM is essentially a bank of switches: ‘off’ represents a 0 and ‘on’ represents a 1. Data is encoded using either ASCII or Unicode and stored in RAM or on a disc drive.

Computer electronics can be constructed using Boolean logic gates, see page 12. Connecting these gates in a certain way, we can create adders, counters, latches (which are basic storage elements) and flip-flop circuits, as well as circuits that implement subtraction, multiplication, division. Using this theory we can build motherboards, CPUs, RAM, and so on. All these electronic circuits do is manipulate 1s and 0s - the binary code.

ASCII code

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), originally used a 7-bit binary code to represent letters, numbers and other characters. Each character is assigned a binary number between 0 to 127.

000-31 is reserved for control characters such as end of line, carriage returns, end of text and so on.

032-126 covers symbols, numbers 0-9, and all lowercase and uppercase letters.

The ASCII code set was later extended to 8bit using the numbers 0 -255 which allowed more characters to be encoded. These included mathematical symbols, international characters and other special characters needed.

Unicode

Unicode is a universal encoding standard for representing the characters of all the la...

Table of contents

• Exploring Computer Systems: 2019 Ed
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Computer Fundamentals
• Hardware Components
• Computer Peripherals
• Computer Software
• Types of Computer
• Understanding Hardware Specifications
• Computer Networks
• The Internet
• Internet Security
• Cloud Computing and the Web