Basic Theory Of Computer Science
This article is intend to explain to new users, who are unfamiliar with computer theory, basic concepts of computing and computer systems organization and structure.
The idea of the creation of this article was inspired by the general disorganization of such kind of theoretic articles and pages at OSDev.org. And as long as theory is very important for beginners (and as long as they generally never ever read serious books), this chaotic structure of theoretic material will cause problems in comprehensive study of OS development. But this article is meant to fix the problem
Managing the complexity of electronic systems
The system you are using to read this article (let me guess it's a personal computer) is one of most complex systems ever created by the mankind. Just imagine hundreds of billions transistors on several separate integrated circuits joint together and operating at gigahertz rates, running hundreds of millions lines of code in a blink of an eye - hundreds of thousands of computer scientists, engineers and programmers united their efforts to make this miracle come true in less than 80 years...
However, I bet you are not experiencing any kind of trouble with using such a "miracle". The main reason of it is that, despite you don't realize it really, you are managing complexity of your system. It have let you to open this article in few mouse clicks (it's not so complex task to complete, right?) without having to keep in mind details of the PCI protocol your CPU use to direct data to your videocard that've send data to the video interface your computer use to interconnect with monitor, that've used this data to change voltage values at the pixel matrix...