Early computing

 Hello world, I’m Carrie Anne, and welcome to CrashCourse Computer Science!

Throughout this series, we’re going to go from bits, bytes, transistors and logic

gates, all the way to Operating Systems, Virtual Reality and Robots!

We’re going to cover a lot, but just to clear things up - we ARE NOT going to teach

you how to program.

Instead, we’re going to explore a range of computing topics as a discipline and a

technology.

Computers are the lifeblood of today’s world.

If they were to suddenly turn off, all at once, the power grid would shut down, and cars

would crash, planes would fall, water treatment plants would stop, stock markets would

freeze,

trucks with food wouldn’t know where to deliver it, and employees wouldn’t get paid.

Even many non-computer objects - like DFTBA shirts and the chair I’m sitting on – are

made in factories run by computers.

Computing has transformed nearly every aspect of our lives.

And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of technology-driven global change.

Advances in manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution brought a new scale to human

civilization

- in agriculture, industry and domestic life.

Mechanization meant superior harvests and more food, mass-produced goods, cheaper and

faster travel and communication, and usually a better quality of life.

And computing technology is doing the same right now – from automated farming and

medical

equipment, to global telecommunications and educational opportunities, and new frontiers

like Virtual Reality and Self Driving Cars.

We are living in a time likely to be remembered as the Electronic Age.

With billions of transistors in just your smartphones, computers can seem pretty complicated,

but really, they’re just simple machines that perform complex actions through many

layers of abstraction.

So in this series, we’re going break down those layers, and build up from simple 1’s

and 0’s, to logic units, CPUs, operating systems, the entire internet and beyond.

And don’t worry, in the same way, someone buying t-shirts on a webpage doesn’t need

to know how that webpage was programmed, or the web designer doesn’t need to know how

all the packets are routed, or router engineers don’t need to know about transistor logic,

this series will build on previous episodes but not be dependent on them.

By the end of this series, I hope that you can better contextualize computing’s role

both in your own life and society, and how humanity's (arguably) greatest invention is

just in its infancy, with its biggest impacts yet to come.

But before we get into all that, we should start at computing’s origins, because although

electronic computers are relatively new, and the need for computation is no

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