Section 1:

Brief History: from the dawn of

computers to C language
Lecture 1: The Very Beginning - Digits in Electric Dippers
• The issue with Analogue Electronics – it requires developing circuit per challenge – takes a
long time.
• Attempts to create such a circuit that will be programmable after its assembled led to the
creation of Digital computing – a machine that “talks” through numbers – it gets numbers as
inputs, commands encoded into numbers, and spills out the result as numbers.
• Digital machines represent numbers using the binary counting system.

Lecture 2: The Binary Nature

• Binary counting explained – representation of natural numbers with only two digits.
• Conversion from binary to decimal – through powers of two (like in decimal each decimal
digit represents a power of ten, in binary it’s the same, but with powers of two)

Lecture 3: About Bytes and the 1024 Confusion

• A single binary digit is called a “Bit”
• A group of 8 Bits that store altogether a single number – are called a “Byte”
• The computers memory works in chunks of Byte.
• The 1024 confusion:
o Kilo means 1000. Like in Kilometer, Kilogram, etc.
o In digital computing, informally, it was 1024 since it’s exactly 2 to the 10th, and it has
practical implications.
o However, strictly speaking, manufactures can interpret Kilo as 1000 and then it
happens that you see in Windows (for example) that the volume of your Disk on key
you’ve bought is smaller than what’s written on the box…

Lecture 4: Get to Know the Family: The Ancestors of C

• Brief historical plot of how numbers and commands were communicated to computers -
from the times of punch cards and punch films, through the appearance of keyboards and till
Assembly – which wrapped the command enumeration with humanly readable names.

Lecture 5: The C Programming Language:

• Brief history of the Creation of C, and the versions of C – K&R 78’, 89’, 99’ and C11.
• Also, we’ve explained the confusion about the term ANSI.

Cheers!
Shmuel.