This is the first of our lectures for people who are doing this course but are
new to programming. If you've got no programming experience
you're probably going to have to work a little bit harder in this course.
It will be a little bit more challenging though we will guide you through it, and
this, these lectures will explain the major concepts.
And we're also going to put up a bunch of other materials that can support you.
before we talk about programming we need to think a little bit about what a
computer is, in order to understand how to program.
this is a computer, the inside of a PC, I, I just got off flickr.
and you can see it's messy. There's lots of microchips, there's sort
of motherboards, wires everywhere. But actually we don't really, to program,
we don't need to know what a computer is in all it's complexity.
Actually all we need to know is some very simple things, and And really we just
need to know two things that make up a computer.
This is the processor. It's not actually a processor, it's a
fan, but underneath that fan is the processor.
The processor is the thing that does calculations.
It does actions. It really is the core computer.
And the other main that we need to know about is memory.
This is where we store data. And anything that is, you know, any form
of data that we are processing in the computer must go through memory.
And really what a computer does and what a computer program does is.
The processor does actions on memory, memory is composed of very very simple
output, so it's, what we call bits. Each bit can, is like a switch.
It can be on or off. And we normally represent that as a zero
and a one. So, really memory is along Series.
And the processor, what that does is very simple operations on memory.
It can add two elements of memory together, multiply those mathematical
operations, very simple ones, and it can move things around in memory.
And that's It's a little bit more compelx than that, but really not much at all,
it's, you know, what, it's only these very simple things.
So, why are computers so powerful, if all they can do is, is, move around and add
together zeroes and ones. Well, the reason is, because memory is
very, very big. So it's measured in gigabytes, that's
billions, American billions of, of bytes. A byte is eight of these bits.
So there's a lot similarly processes summations in gigahurtz which essentially
billions of these very simple instructions per second.
so a computer program is really about doing a simple things.
But very, very fast and lots. Luckily we don't have to think in terms
of the very, very simple operations that can, that processors we can do when we
want the computer to programs. We turn them into what we call high level
languages, that have, that combine lot's and lot's of these, very simple
operations into bigger ones. this still may not look very readable to
someone that's new in programming. But you can see that, at least we've got
much higher level concepts like Backgrounds, in the background color of
the screen, rotating things around, drawing images, stuff that's, that's at
least a bit more in the, the realm of what we think about as humans.
Similarly those, those ones and zeroes in memory, we can interpret them in many,
many ways to create many complex forms of data.