01_Early_Computing

Hello world, I'm Carrie Anne, and welcome to Crash Course Computer Science!

Over the course of this series, we're going to go from bits, bytes, transistors and logic gates, all the way to Operating Systems, Virtual Reality and Robots! We're going to cover a lot, but just to clear things up - we ARE NOT going to teach you how to program. Instead, we're going to explore a range of computing topics as a discipline and a technology.

Computers are the lifeblood of today's world. If they were to suddenly turn off all at once, the power grid would shut down, cars would crash, planes would fall, water treatment plants would stop, stock markets would freeze, trucks with food wouldn't know where to diliver, and employees wouldn't get paid.

Even many non-computer objects - like DFTBA shirts and the chair I'm sitting on - are made in factories run by computers. Computing really has transformed nearly every aspect of our lives. And this isn't the first time we've seen this sort of technology-driven global change.

Advances in manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution brought a new scale to human civilization. - in agriculture, industry and domestic life. Mechanization meant superior harvests and more food, mass produced goods, cheaper and faster travel and communication, and usually a better quality of life.

And computing technology is doing the same right now - from automated farming and medical equipments, to global telecommunications and educational opportunities, and new frontiers like virtual reality and self driving cars. We are living in a time likely to be remembered as the Electronic Age.

With billions of transistors in just your smartphones, computers can seem pretty complicated, but really, they're just simple machines that perform complex actions through many layers of abstraction. So in this series, we're going to break down those layers, and build up from simple 1s and 0s, to logic units, CPUs, operating systems, the entire Internet and beyond.