Lecture 1 — Course Introduction; Bits, Bytes and Binary

lecture
computer-systems
binary

See csse2010 for staff, assessment, and course logistics — this note covers the technical content from Lecture 1.

Today’s outline

  • Course intro, organisation and admin
  • Assessment details
  • Technical content — binary numbers

Levels of abstraction

A computer can be understood at several levels of increasing abstraction (from Tanenbaum’s Structured Computer Organisation):

  1. Level 0 — Digital Logic level (gates, circuits) — this course starts here
  2. Level 1 — Microarchitecture level
  3. Level 2 — Instruction set architecture level
  4. Level 3 — Operating system machine level
  5. Level 4 — Assembly language level
  6. Level 5 — Problem-oriented language level

The course roughly climbs this stack over the semester: hardware/digital logic first, then low-level (assembly) software, then high-level software.

Computers and binary numbers

Computers represent everything — inputs, instructions, and outputs — as binary data internally, e.g. 101001010110101001111010101001011100011010101.

See binary-number-representations for the full reference on bits, bytes, unsigned number representation, converting between decimal/binary/octal/hex, and radix notation conventions — all introduced in this lecture.

Reminders

  • Sign up to a pair of lab sessions (P2, P1).
  • Labs start from Thursday of week 1 (P1 sessions only — no P2 sessions in week 1).
  • From week 2, both P2 and P1 sessions run.
  • Lab 1 covers different binary representation formats for signed numbers (two’s complement etc. — not covered in this lecture).
  • A summary recording on binary numbers will be posted by the end of week 1.
  • Lab sign-on issues: email eait.mytimetable@uq.edu.au.