Crash Course Computer Science

We’re going to begin with computer networks, and how they grew from small groups of connected computers on LAN networks to eventually larger worldwide networks like the ARPANET and even the Internet we know today.

From polygon count and meshes, to lighting and texturing, there are a lot of considerations in building the 3D objects we see in our movies and video games, but then displaying these 3D objects of a 2D surface adds an additional number of challenges. So we’ll talk about some of the reasons you see occasional glitches in your video games as well as the reason a dedicated graphics processing unit.

Today, we're going to discuss the critical role graphical user interfaces, or GUIs played in the adoption of computers. Before the mid 1980's the most common way people could interact with their devices was through command line interfaces, which though efficient, aren't really designed for casual users. This all changed with the introduction of the Macintosh by Apple in 1984.

Today we're going to talk about the birth of personal computing. Up until the early 1970s components were just too expensive, or underpowered, for making a useful computer for an individual, but this would begin to change with the introduction of the Altair 8800 in 1975. In the years that follow, we'll see the founding of Microsoft and Apple and the creation of the 1977 Trinity: The Apple II, Tand

Today we’re going to step back from hardware and software, and take a closer look at how the backdrop of the cold war and space race and the rise of consumerism and globalization brought us from huge, expensive codebreaking machines in the 1940s to affordable handhelds and personal computers in the 1970s. This is an era that saw huge government funded projects - like the race to the moon.

Today we begin our discussion of computer graphics. So we ended last episode with the proliferation of command line (or text) interfaces, which sometimes used screens, but typically electronic typewriters or teletypes onto paper. But by the early 1960s a number of technologies were introduced to make screens much more useful from cathode ray tubes and graphics cards to ASCII art and light pens. Th

Today, we are going to start our discussion on user experience. We've talked a lot in this series about how computers move data around within the computer, but not so much about our role in the process. So today, we're going to look at our earliest form of interaction through keyboards. We'll talk about how the keyboard got its qwerty layout, and then we'll track its evolution in electronic typewr

So last episode we talked about some basic file formats, but what we didn’t talk about is compression. Often files are way too large to be easily stored on hard drives or transferred over the Internet - the solution, unsurprisingly, is to make them smaller. Today, we’re going to talk about lossless compression, which will give you the exact same thing when reassembled, as well as lossy compression

Today we’re going to look at how our computers read and interpret computer files. We’ll talk about how some popular file formats like txt, wave, and bitmap are encoded and decoded giving us pretty pictures and lifelike recordings from just strings of 1’s and 0’s, and we’ll discuss how our computers are able to keep all this data organized and readily accessible to users. You’ll notice in this epis

So we’ve talked about computer memory a couple times in this series, but what we haven’t talked about is storage. Data written to storage, like your hard drive, is a little different, because it will still be there even if the power goes out - this is known as non-volatile memory. Today we’re going to trace the history of these storage technologies from punch cards, delay line memory, core memory,

So as you may have noticed from last episode, computers keep getting faster and faster, and by the start of the 1950s they had gotten so fast that it often took longer to manually load programs via punch cards than to actually run them! The solution was the operating system (or OS), which is just a program with special privileges that allows it to run and manage other programs. So today, we’re goi

So you may have heard of Moore's Law and while it isn't truly a law it has pretty closely estimated a trend we've seen in the advancement of computing technologies. Moore's Law states that we'll see approximately a 2x increase in transistors in the same space every two years, and while this may not be true for much longer, it has dictated the advancements we've seen since the introduction of trans