Part AVolume 1Chapters 1–6
The Physical World
Rock, electricity, silicon, transistors, logic and memory. Everything a computer is made of, before any software exists.
6 chapters79,650 wordsabout 6 hours reading
Part A chapters
1
The Whole Machine in One Look
You will be able to say what a computer actually is, with nothing magical left in it.
8,362 words/36 min read2Electricity - The Thing That Does All The Work
You will be able to say what electricity is, in terms of atoms and the particles inside them.
12,537 words/55 min read3From Sand to Silicon - Rock, Furnace, Wafer, Fab
You will be able to say where the silicon in a chip comes from, naming the rock and the furnace.
12,232 words/53 min read4The Transistor - The Switch That Built The World
You will be able to say what a transistor is, in one sentence, without lying.
12,994 words/56 min read5Logic Gates and Arithmetic - How Switches Learn to Add
You will be able to explain how a rule about true and false became a rule about electricity, and who made that jump and when.
19,290 words/84 min read6How a Machine Remembers - Latches, Clocks and Memory Cells
You will explain why a plain logic gate cannot remember anything. You will draw an SR latch and say what all four input pairs do.
14,235 words/62 min read