On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 11:56 -0500, William Case wrote: > I found that when teaching myself 'C', 10 or 20 minutes contemplating > an 'and' or an 'or' gate gave me enough of an 'aha!' that I could > understand what was going on. Of course, that was proceeded by > another twenty minutes or so understanding the basic switching > capabilities of transistors. Getting to understand basic computing > cycles as governed by a crystal clock put everything into proportion > timewise. The same with a template of a CPU showing things like the > decoder, registers, and the ALU. I spent just enough time to get the > idea of how data and instructions flowed. Knowing why there was a > difference between DRAM (capacitors) memory and SRAM (flip-flops) > memory answered a lot of questions of why things were done one way > rather than the other. That was stuff we needed to know when programming really slow microcomputer systems, as timing was dependent on how long the program took to execute each step, rather than the program waiting for some time clock to say now's the time to start it. You also needed to know that when you were building the hardware to go along with it, too. I wonder if kids will build their own MP3 players, the way we built a crystal radio set? ;-) -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
