Computer Architecture

Things have been getting really interesting in class.

I've had an intense interest in computers since I was really small. I still remember how thrilled I was when I first encountered those fantastic DOS games and later the Windows 98 ones which kept me engaged for weeks and months. Those fondness for games soon spread into the domains of computer hardware as development of games necessitated increasingly faster CPUs and larger RAMs. Even now that I no longer have much time to play games I still find myself needing to deal with the nitty-gritty of computers on a daily basis, such as trying to figure out why the heck my internet is down again. However, after years of dealing with computers I was still in the dark with regards to the basic mechanisms by which computer works. Sure, many people of my age nowadays probably have a sound knowledge of what kind of gears to get for their latest gaming machine, which type of CPU goes with which motherboard and which graphics card, but how does computer actually work at the fundamental level? How do hardware run on a binary number system and how does such a simple system transform into the awesome graphics and mechanics of Skyrim or COD? All my knowledge about computers seemed to have been built in the air and that really bothered me.

This is no longer the case! The knowledge about hardware architectures, OS, and network covered in class has really rooted almost everything I've learned about computers in the past years, and that's such a wonderful feeling. We learned that digital computers utilize two states, in this case, ON and OFF states of a tiny capacitor to represent "1" and "0". Strings of these "1"s and "0"s can then be converted into complicated numbers using IEEE floating point scheme; into all kinds of characters using Unicode; into images using the RGBa scheme, and finally into sounds with LPCM. Moreover, we learned about the basic method in which CPU works: the Program Counter of the Control Unit keeps track of the steps of the program, the Instruction Register decodes instructions of the program, while other Registers store temporary information and the Arithmetic Unit carries out the hardwired procedures of arithmetic and logical operations. We also learned about how Bus is a limiting factor for the overall computing speed of a computer (hence why it's a complete waste of money to get a top-notch CPU but only equip it with a cheap motherboard). The lecture also cleared my doubt with regard to how computers store information: magnetic dipoles on concentric tracts of a platter in hard drives, pits on spiral tracts of a compact disc, electron chambers of a flash drive. It also satisfied my curiosity about OS: what actually is a kernel? Well, it's simply a shell that layers between users and hardware, taking care of all the basic level hardware operations needed for running a high level command from the user. It also really surprised me when Danny mentioned how Mac OS actually developed from Linux, and that Linux/Unix are not only running on desktops, but also mainframes. Oh, don't even get me started on the network typologies and communication protocols. How my home Ethernet works have bothered me for years, and now I finally have an idea of what IP addresses, gateways, TCP/IP mean when fixing my crappy internet. Hooray!

After more than a decade of playing this game, I finally have a faint idea of how it's working now... sweet :)