August 2022
Intermediate to advanced
480 pages
12h 55m
English
Content preview from Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, 2nd Edition
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Chapter Fifteen
Is This for Real?
In the previous chapter, you saw how you can wire relays together to make a 1-bit adder and then combine eight of them to add two bytes together. You even saw how those 8-bit adders could be cascaded to add even larger numbers, and you may have wondered, Is this really how computers add numbers?
Well, yes and no. One big difference is that computers today are no longer made from relays. But they were at one time.
In November 1937, a researcher at Bell Labs named George Stibitz (1904–1995) took home a couple of relays used in telephone switching circuits. On his kitchen table, he combined these relays with batteries, two lightbulbs, and two switches he made from strips of metal cut from tin cans. It was a 1-bit ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.