The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
 |
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Code rattled around in my head for about a decade before I started writing it. As I was contemplating Code and then writing it, and even after the book was published, people would ask me, "What's the book about?"
I was always reluctant to answer this question. I'd mumble something about "a unique journey through the evolution of the digital technologies that define the modern age" and hope that would be sufficient.
But finally I had to admit it: "Code is a book about how computers work."
As I feared, the reactions weren't favorable. "Oh, I have a book like that," some people would say, to which my immediate response was, "No, no, no, you don't have a book like this one." I still think that's true. Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.
The other comment I heard was, "People don't want to know how computers work." And this I'm sure is true. I personally happen to enjoy learning how things work. But I also like to choose which things I learn about and which I do not. I'd be hard pressed to explain how my refrigerator works, for example.
Yet I often hear people ask questions that reveal a need to know something about the inner workings of personal computers. One such common question is, "What's the difference between storage and memory?"
That's certainly a critical question. The marketing of personal computers is based on such concepts. Even novice users are expected to know how many megas of the one thing and gigas of the other thing will be necessary for their particular applications. Novice users are also expected to master the concept of the computer "file" and to visualize how files are loaded from storage into memory and saved from memory back to storage.
The storage-and-memory question is usually answered with an analogy: "Memory is like the surface of your desk and storage is like the filing cabinet." That's not a bad answer as
far as it goes. But I find it quite
Comments
Post a Comment