★ LITTÉRATURE ★ ENGLISH ★ ILLUSTRATING COMPUTERS (WITHOUT MUCH JARGON)|Australian Personal Computer) ★ |
| Illustrating Computers (Without Much Jargon) | Littérature English |
Since you are reading this column, it is fairly safe for me to assume that you know what a computer is. and (to some extent) how it works. That being the case, you are probably asked questions on such subjects from time to time. If you get tired of answering them, you could do worse than directing the questioner to "Illustrating Computers (without much jargon)" by Colin Day and Donald Alcock. This book is unusual in that instead of being typeset it reproduces Donald Alcock's amazingly legible handwriting. The bulk of the informative and often witty illustrations are also his work, although there are a few photographs showing what a "chip" actually looks like. The book deals with computers from first principles, asking"why bother about them?", and offering a very plausible answer: "only with this knowledge [of how they work) can one judge both the potential of computers and their limitations. Any mystery surrounding computers can be dispelled only by giving some explanation of the way they go about their work." The subject of coding is introduced very early in the book. The idea of a binary representation is presented by a row of cats heading towards their dinner — some have their tails up (1s), while the rest have them down (0s). The way in which a computer works is explained at a very low level, building from simple logic elements like AND gates through adding circuits. The fabrication of integrated circuits is also described, along with a brief history of electronics starting with crystal sets and vacuum tubes. One of the most valuable sections of Day & Alcock's book describes programming. Unlike many authors, they draw a distinction between the languages that a computer "understands", and those it may appear to understand, in other words between machine languages and programming languages. The significance of this depends on the readers purposes, but as the authors have set out to explain the nature of computers it is an important point. This is the best book I have seen for people who want to know about the nature of computers as opposed to their applications or the task of programming them.
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