How Computers Work... in 1971

prostoalex writes "A recent submission to my free tech books site included a title that I thought many Slashdotters would enjoy. How It Works: The Computer (published 1971 and re-published 1979) is an exciting look into this new thing called computer. The site presents the scanned pages of 1971 and 1979 editions, and you can see how the page on computer code changes over 8 years from punchcards exclusively to magnetic tapes."

Comments

I've still got that book

[palfreman]

I've still got that book. It's been pretty out of date for a long time (er, very out of date), but it is very good at explaining things like assembler, old style core memory and flow charting for kids - sets them on the right path, instead of messing them up with an a childized gui's, talking elephants and suchlike.

The people who wrote this book basically felt that a child of 8 should not have the inner workings of a computer being hidden from them, but be taught th technical side from day 1.

Anyway, 20 years later this book is still where I first learnt about flow charts and cpu registers!