Knowledge of a Computer's Inner Workings

Why is it important to understand my computer’s hardware and boot up sequence?

Just off the top of my head.

Every component takes memory and power to run. Let’s say I will be on a flight going somewhere. My battery has only a finite amount of time that it will last before I will need to power it up again. I could create a boot disk that would only “start up” the necessary components that I will use en route to my destination, thereby allowing me to work longer – saving my battery life.

A couple of things on the knowledge of the inner workings of the components of the computer:

The whole “blue ray” technology allows more memory to be stored on the finite area of a disk. To my understanding, blue has a smaller wavelength than red and therefore uses less space. I believe the next big thing could be ultraviolet lasers to store and read memory. Ultraviolet has an even smaller wavelength than blue. Does the color of the ray need to be in the visible spectrum?

Quite possibly the resolution of the latest cameras have gotten too good and consequently causes the digital files to take a lot of memory. This might cause someone to try to upload files that take an incredible amount of time, when the resolution that they took their pictures at was overkill. This happened to me last night. I watched my computer try to upload a file that was 111 MB, that’s right 111 Million Bytes. This took over 2 hours. When it was done the location to which I was uploading said the file was too big. I don’t know why it didn’t tell me as the 2 hours started and not when it was done. This may not have the most to do with the inner workings of my computer, but it is on my mind now. Thankfully I have a wife who knows quite a bit about imaging software and she was able to scale down the sizes of my pictures, thus making the powerpoint presentation smaller and “uploadable”. Consequently, I was able to get my assignment done on time. A little more knowledge about the relative sizes of files is now in my memory bank…

My Computer Experience (in a nutshell)

The first computer class that I took was Basic Computer Programming in high school. We worked on TRS-80’s (Tandy from Radio Shack). I can remember writing short programs that would do some redundant operation. I was very impressed, but I didn’t see that computers would encompass all that they do today. It is one of my biggest regrets that I didn’t get a degree in programming (along with my math degree) or at least try. I found programming to be so logical. Some memories include “swap routines” and “dimensioning arrays” and trying to figure out what was happening with the data that was being input to a 4 dimensional array (I recall a friend telling me to envision a row of Rubik's cubes with drawers in each dimension of each cube, it worked!). I still find myself writing programs to calculate data for tasks that I perform often.

I want to take Visual Basic and Java classes to be able to program on 64 bit computers like I used to on older computers. I have put together some Excel spreadsheets that will generate some problems and results that I use to test students understanding of concepts, for instance, 2 by 2, 3 by 3 matrices, lines, parabolas and their solutions/characteristics, etc. I have also written some spreadsheets that calculate information for golf leagues and outings. The limitation in these spreadsheets is that they are “static”. I wish to have some programs that are “dynamic”, in other words, the programs will ask the user for occasional input and process his/her answers leading him/her to some subroutines (applets?) that will further the results that he/she is looking for. I have tried to learn some Visual Basic on my own. I experimented with macros, but only slightly. The problem that I encountered was the computer that I would run the macro on sooner or later would give some warning as to the possibility that my macro was a “virus” and would ask for the administers password or would not run the macro altogether.