Programing Fundamentals

This new generation of Computer processing is performed by transistors, which basically are switches with two possible states, one is on and the other off. Transistors are assigned a value of 1 or 0, if it has a value of 1 the transistor state is on, but if the value is 0 then the state would be off, making millions of times each second depending on what the transistor has being assigned. All computer data is converted to a series of binary numbers. Whenever we see a word, sentence or a collection of letters, the computer sees each letter as a collection of 1s and 0s. Computers represent data by binary numbers; this system is to covert data into strings of numbers. A single unit of data is called a bit. Computers work with collections of bits, grouping them to represent data, such as letters of the alphabet. However a certain amount of bits will make up some bytes, example eight bits make up one byte, this one is the amount of memory needed to store alphanumeric characters. With each byte the computers can represent any of the 256 different symbols or characters. One of the most important systems that represents data or characters the human being can understand is the test codes. An example of a text code system is the EBCDIC. This system uses eight bit codes, but is used primarily in older mainframe systems. Others examples of text code sets are ASCII which is used in all personal computers and Unicode text code set which each character consists of 16 bits or two bytes of data.

Each process takes places in the Central Processing Unit or for short CPU. Also the memory plays an important role in processing data. The CPU has two very important or main parts, the arithmetic logic unit and the control unit which is in charge of the flow of data through the CPU plus other devices, storing the microcode, which contains the instructions for all the tasks.

The Arithmetic Logic Unit is the most important place where the manipulation of data takes place, performing...