Let's Design a Computer from Scratch
Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 6:10 pm
Very informative series of episodes on Security Now podcast where Steve Gibson explains, in simple layman's terms, exactly how a computer operates at the machine level.
Those of you who don't know how a computer actually works will be surprised to discover that it's actually extremely simple on the most basic level. Just a bunch of very simple operations executed one at a time. It's only the fact that a modern computer can run these operation VERY fast that gives the illusion that there's a lot more going on than there really is.
Even though I used to program in assembler and know most of this, I still found it a good refresher and I am looking forward to an upcoming episode on multi-threading which I never learned to deal with in assembler since I used to code back in the single thread days on 6502 CPUs (Apple, Commodore, etc).
First episode in the series is episode 233 and then each subsequent episode is an odd number episode because he does a Q&A on even number episodes. Click the speaker icon under an episode for the MP3 audio file, and there are also PDF and TXT transcripts which sometimes makes it easier to follow along.
http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
Those of you who don't know how a computer actually works will be surprised to discover that it's actually extremely simple on the most basic level. Just a bunch of very simple operations executed one at a time. It's only the fact that a modern computer can run these operation VERY fast that gives the illusion that there's a lot more going on than there really is.
Even though I used to program in assembler and know most of this, I still found it a good refresher and I am looking forward to an upcoming episode on multi-threading which I never learned to deal with in assembler since I used to code back in the single thread days on 6502 CPUs (Apple, Commodore, etc).
First episode in the series is episode 233 and then each subsequent episode is an odd number episode because he does a Q&A on even number episodes. Click the speaker icon under an episode for the MP3 audio file, and there are also PDF and TXT transcripts which sometimes makes it easier to follow along.
http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm