Computers really have allowed us to do some pretty amazing things
- global telecommunications, international commerce, global transportation, breakthroughs in
medicine, distributed education, online shopping, online dating, just the Internet in general. - Computers are allowing us to explore our own world and other worlds, and of course some seemingly mundane things like permitting us to spy on our pets from work or communicate with our friends in a nearly indecipherable stream of emoji!
But don't call computers magical.
So before we get into what we are going to talk about in this course, it might be useful to tell you what we aren't going to talk about.
- We aren't going to teach you how to program.
- But what we are going to look are the history of computers... even before we had electricity. We're going retrace the design decisions that have given us our president-day components. We're going to talk about how Operating Systems work...or don't work...how the YouTubes get to you over the Internet, how our smartphones and other smart devices are... well getting smarter, and of course mysterious futuristic stuff like quantum computing and frustrating present-day stuff like hacking!
Needless to say, I am passionate about this stuff
- not because computers are these amazing devices that are always making our lives easier (sometimes that's debatable)
- but because computers inarguably have become pivotal in our society. From our cars and thermostats to pacemakers and cellphones, computers are everywhere,
By the end of this course you'll have a better understanding and appreciation for
- how far we're come and
- how far they may take us.
