Roger Young

How Computers Work: Processor and Main Memory Roger Young

The book is as simple as possible and aimed at a non-technical audience with absolutely no knowledge of computers or electronics, but it is an electrical engineering text. A typical page consists of a circuit diagram (or program) and a paragraph or two of explanation. The book begins with a VERY simple circuit and continues to a very complex circuit (a computer) while explaining everything. Everything has been made as simple as possible while leaving nothing out. Eighty-four circuit diagrams and some timing diagrams and short programs make every point clear.

Computers are the most complex machines that have ever been created. This is the first book to make it possible for ordinary people to understand precisely how the processor, the main and most complex part of a computer, works. In fact, it completely explains the operation of a complete, though simple, computer.

Relays, which are explained, are used in the circuitry instead of transistors for simplicity, though transistors are mentioned.

Did you ever wonder what a bit, a latch, a word (of memory), a data bus, an address bus, a memory, a register, a processor, a timing diagram, a clock (of a processor), an instruction, or machine code is? Though most explanations of how computers work are a lot of analogies or require a background in electrical engineering, this book will tell you precisely what each of them is and how each of them works without requiring any previous knowledge of computers or electronics.