OSHR 1510 - From Punch Cards to Personal Computers (Short Course)

This course is offered through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Colorado State University. You must be a member of Osher to enroll in this course.

Are computers magic? Or, are they really "electronic brains" as depicted in the popular press and movies? The answer to both of these questions is "No." Computers are basically simple machines though they have become increasingly sophisticated and complex to achieve faster speed.

This course will stick to the simple description of a computer and leave current developments to the experts and entrepreneurs. Emphasis is on computer hardware, not software. A "non-fear" of numbers is helpful but not necessary.

You will be introduced to the simple underlying structure of a computer beginning with how information is represented and how that information is processed. It will address questions such as:

• How much memory should my computer have?
• How much disk storage do I need?
• Why do we "de-frag" and what does this mean?

Topics will include:

• representation of information,
• logical operations,
• computing components,
• processor architect.

Noncredit courses do not produce academic credit nor appear on a Colorado State University academic transcript.

Instructors

Gerold Johnson

Gearold Johnson, Ph. D., has had a love affair with all things computing for fifty years from calculating lunar trajectories for Project Apollo in the 1960s to manipulating digital photographs today. He is the Emeritus George T. Abell Chair in Engineering at Colorado State University where he taught engineering and computer science courses for twenty-three years. He was a visiting professor of computing at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England and at the California Institute of Technology. He also served as a visiting researcher at Shape Data Ltd. in Cambridge, England where he was a member of the design team for Parasolid, a three-dimensional modeling software package in wide-spread use in engineering companies today.

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