In the beginning, there was binary...

Welcome to the first of my informal, unscheduled, irreverent and hopefully interesting blogs aimed at helping my friends and family to better understand computers and the internet and also to share interesting and useful software and sites on the internet. I find that computers are still decidedly user "unfriendly" despite the best of intentions and marketing hype by the major players in the personal computer industry. Many extremely intelligent individuals are left feeling lost when confronted with what should be simple tasks, and are simply overwhelmed when needing to do anything remotely complex. Don't worry about abbreviations and such. All will be explained in time.

I will focus primarily on the Windows XP Operating System (OS) as that is what my computers currently run, and it is the most common OS currently in use. Though I have an older Apple iMac computer, and though I like Apple Computers inovative nature, I find the OS X operating system a bit less user friendly than Windows. This is a personal observation only, and is based in part upon my much longer usage of Windows software relative to Apple software which I am still figuring out. I also find there is more and better software for Windows, at least for my purposes and again based upon my own experience. The exception to this is the Mac's iMovie and iDVD which do make editing and burning home movies easier than any Windows application I've yet found.

My qualifications are simply that I have a lot of experience using various computers. I am a computer geek, a gadget and gizmo collector, and am hopelessly addicted to the internet. I got my first computer when I was sixteen. It was an Apple II with 48K of RAM and game programs on cassette tape. I later added a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. Each disk could store 144K of information. Compare this with todays computers that use hard drives with Gigabytes and memory capacities in Megabytes. When Apple came out with a new operating system called ProDOS, and most Apple owners only had a single floppy disk drive, I was inspired to find a way to move files from the old OS to the new ProDOS. I wrote my first and only published article illustrating this technique. The Apple II came with a free version of the BASIC computer language and I taught myself how to write computer programs. Later, I studied some electronics and got an AA and a BS degree in Computer Science. So, I am obviously just enough of a computer nut to have some knowledge to pass along.

I'm going to try to keep my e-mails simple and to the point. I will refer to websites when I feel they are helpful or simply interesting. I will entertain questions, but make no guarantees about answers. I love to teach and to help, but I don't have all the answers, have far too little time, and troubleshooting computers remotely is not always efficient or even possible.

Okay, to the subject of the e-mail. In the beginning, there was binary. We are all used to counting in a number system called "Base 10". Basically, there are ten digits before you start repeating the cycle. i.e. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 then 10, 11, 12, 13..., and so on. Computers use "Base 2". In this system, there are only two digits, zero and one. You count as follows: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100. It's easier to show in a column, as below.

Base 10 Base 2
------------ -----------
0 0
1 1
2 10
3 11
4 100
5 101
6 110
7 111
8 1000
9 1001
10 1010
11 1011
12 1100
13 1101
14 1110
15 1111

So, why do computers use Base 2? Because zeros and ones correspond to on and off in electrical switches. In simplified terms, vacumn tubes, transistors, and microchips are made up of large numbers nothing more than sets of on and off switches. Vacumn tubes such as were found in early radios and televisions were small sets of switches. Transistors had hundreds or thousands of such switches. Microprocessors have thousands or millions of such switches.

I won't go into detail about how these sets of switches manage to do the seemingly magical things computers can do. Switches change states depending on other switches and by the way they are hard-wired, they have specific effects. These hard-wired "programs" using on and off switches, represented by ones and zeroes, use what is known as "machine language".

At a higher level, are software programs which can direct the hard-wired programs to perform their actions in varying sequences. Software is so names because it is not hard-wired, but can be changed thereby performing different functions with the same hard-wired components. Software can be written directly in machine language, or in more advanced and human-like languages which are then converted into machine language to function.

An "Operating System", or "OS" as mentioned earlier, is a high-level program or set of programs, that present an interface to the hardware designed to be easier for humans to interact with. Windows is a popular OS that uses a "Graphical User Interface" or "GUI" as an attractive and relatively easy to use interface between humans and computers. Before GUI's, computers comunicated with their users via punched cards, printers, led displays, and text only video monitors. The first GUI was developed at Xerox. The first personal computer to use one was Apple. Microsoft later adopted the GUI interface for Windows. GUI's have made computers relatively easy to interact with and more fun to use. However, calling them "user friendly", may be going too far.

For more information on this and far, far more, check out the "History of Computing" on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing. Wikipedia is a free, volunteer driven, online encyclopedia that is an excellent and interesting source of information on just about anything you can think of.

To search a large amount of the internet for any keywords, I highly recommend the Google search engine at http://www.google.com. The Google search engine can help you to find nearly anything you are seeking if it is on the internet. It has sub-search-engines for images, shopping, searching newsgroups, and more.

This blog is really just a test. If enough people like it and find it useful, I may continue. If not, then I might not. I wrote the above content late night after a busy day at work, so please forgive any spelling or grammar errors. The content is correct to the best of my knowledge.

Subjects are not necessarily dependent on previous blogs, and content may vary wildly. So, if you want more, let me know. Otherwise, this type of thing is history, finished, caput.

While I reserve copyright on this blogged material, I authorize it to be shared freely, so long as it is provided at no charge, and without modification. It is intended to ease the of use of computers and stimulate interest in learning about computers. Readers are encouraged to share this material whenever they feel it may be of benefit to another.

© 2007 Jim Eubanks. All rights reserved.