Computers and How They Work

As part of software development I have used tools that are helpful during the development process. Two of these tools are version and issue management tools. These tools are used in software development for organization and monitoring status of the software development. While they are associated with software development, I have found them useful for other types of projects such as technical manual development. I've successfully used version management for technical manuals development for fifteen years and issue tracking for five years.

I've used computers for many years in many ways. I've developed software for them, used software tools, supported computers on a local network and helped users with computer problems. During that time I've seen software used in many different ways by different users.  A common problem I've seen is users excited about using a software tool at the start of a project only to lose interest and fall back to older software or real world tools. The chosen software didn't work as expected and it is easier to fall back on old methods of doing a task.

I'd like to share an additional way to keep up with news of people. If a person has a website there is a good chance they also have something called an RSS feed.

I've now completed my series about the basic functions of computers. My intent was to share information about the stack of technology that is used to perform modern computing. As part of the process I learned some new facts about the history of computers and reminded myself of the basic concepts that underly the current set of computers.

Operating systems are the final piece that ties everything together for a computer. An operating system manages access to hardware devices, the software programs on our computer and how we interface with them. In this article I provide a very high level overview of operating systems and how they work. I also provide my opinions on the impact operating systems have on the way we use computers.

Software languages allow people to create systems that can react to input and change the behavior of the systems. This is different from hardware that has fixed functions which cannot be changed after the system is built. Firmware is somewhere in between this, it can be updated but requires special hardware to change the code. Software languages can be changed and stored on a hard drive which make software programs easier to update.

This article provides a high level overview of software languages and the role they play in how computers work.

While numbering systems are not part of the hardware of a computer, understanding numbering systems is helpful for programming computers. This article provides some basic explanation of numbering systems and why the use of different numbering systems are helpful in understanding how computers work. A heads up, I like math and this article contains a lot of math stuff in it. If you aren't into math, feel free to skip to the section about the usefulness of numbering systems for computer programming and usage.

Machine and Assembly Language are the base languages for computers. In this article I will provide a high level overview of both languages and how they work with the computer.