This has got to be the vastest subject on the internet. There is no such thing as a standard computer scientist, everyone has a specialty.

I’ve looked at dozens of computer science curriculums from dozens of sources, mainly colleges and tech forums.

But before I look into the fundamentals, I’m going to start with my favorite part of any subject, why?

What is the purpose of a computer? What are its basic functions? A mix of search results say: To absorb, store, process, and display data.

Computers are our creation that saves us an impossible amount of thinking. We couldn’t create or achieve most things we have today if it weren’t for computers.

So since I got the purpose down, let’s look at the components.

The first thing to do when faced with a mound of information is to note the overlaps. So these are the overlapping subjects I’ve seen in the fundamentals of computer science:

Programming & Internet are already apparent in this list

1. Data algorithms
2. Data structures
3. Operating systems
4. Compilers
5. Databases
6. Networking
7. An understanding of abstraction
8. Memory
9. Security

For hardware, we got:

1. Motherboard
2. Central processing unit (CPU)
3. Random access memory (RAM)
4. Graphics processing unit (GPU)
5. Storage
6. Power supply unit (PSU)
7. Operating system
8. System cooling

So this should be plenty to start with 😅.

Book

I’m picking up off of chapter 6 in my beginning book CODE by Charles Petzold (published by Microsoft Press). The first few chapters start with Morse code and basic electricity.

You can look more into Morse code on your own, it’s just meant to introduce you to basic communication through electronics. The most interesting fact I’ve learned is how e (•) and t (-) are the simplest characters in Morse, which makes sense given they’re the most common letters in our language.

The electronics chapters take you through a scenario of you and a friend using batteries, lightbulbs, and wires to create y’all own system to use Morse code. I won’t go through the diagram itself, I’ll just list the tidbits I’ve learned.

I know most electricians don’t care for the ‘water and pipes’ analogy, but I’ll stick to it for now to keep it simple. I’m aware it falls apart at some point.

In theory, if you have 2 batteries, connect a copper wire from one’s negative and the other’s positive, and touch that wire to a lightbulb, it should light up. This small situation is called a circuit.

What’s happening is the current (amount of water in the pipe/amps) travels through the wire at a certain level of resistance (width of the pipe/ohms).

The more complex a circuit is, the more wires you have to use, which obviously start to get tangled. To save us this trouble, we can use a commoner, which acts as an unaffected connector within a circuit; I might be wrong on this, but I’m seeing it to be similar to the function of the free space in bingo.

They also do a slight alternative where they stick a copper pole into the ground to act as a… ‘ground’ (electrical contact with the earth). Directly from the book: “Earth to electrons are what oceans to drops of water“.

Once again, this is basic electricity, and I’m not even sure that all of this is right, so don’t blame me if you shock yourself.

To move on…

Chapter 6 starts with a short bio of Samuel Morse and his relation to Mathew Brady, one of history’s first photographers who took portraits of high-profile figures including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, along with photos of Civil War infantries.

It also introduced me to semaphore, which is a form of language that involves the waving of flags in certain directions. Actually, I’m half wrong on that. There is such a thing as flag semaphore, but it can also be applied to computers. My ignorant definition is it’s an abstract variable of information that connects disparate sources. This is most likely wrong, so I’ll give this a backseat.

This is what I love about learning. You approach one subject and end up learning random facts about others.

So this is saying that Morse invented the telegraph, while Google says that David Alter did a year before. I’ll ignore that for now and go along with Morse.

Telegraph literally means “far writing”. Since it’s unfeasible to use lightbulbs for long-distance communication, Morse relied on electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism, simply put, is a coil of wire wrapped around an iron bar (looks similar to a spool of thread) which allows it to attract other iron and steel objects.

The original telegraph employed a clicker (or sounder) which used Morse code as its language.

I’m not even going to try to write out the process, I’ll just link a video that best demonstrates how a telegraph worked.

But wire can only stretch so far, so during the first implementation, they created relays to simply accept the message and resend it. The book uses an example of you staying in a hut in the middle of the country to relay a message from New York to California. Regardless of how many messages you got per day, that sounds like a boring job.

What I Learned Today

1. The purpose of a computer
   
2. Fundamentals of computer science and hardware
   
3. Basic function of a circuit
   
4. Basic function of a telegraph
   

Random Tidbits

• Who Mathew Brady was and what he did
• Attempted understanding of semaphore

Pretty good start today. A computer’s main function is to deal with information, so it’s understandable to start with basic electronics. I’ll be picking up on chapter 7 of CODE which takes me into a brief history of numbers.