CSCI 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Fifth Air Force, Boolean Algebra, Nibble

• School: Dalhousie University
• Department: Computer Science
• Course: CSCI 1120
• Professor: Christian Blouin

Document Summary

Hardware --> operating system --> application software/user interface software (uis) --> human elements. The purpose of this course is to understand the underlining workings of the hardware upon which software that we design can be built. Binary system: information is stored as strings of numbers existing in a state of 1 or 0 . Each digit of the string of number is know as a bit. It is expressed as only 2 states as there is only two electrical voltage possibilities for a given bit (high = 0, low = 1) Should there be more voltage possibilities, errors can occur as the transmission of electrical voltage is not perfect. Units: recap - each digit is called a bit. 2 nibbles = 1 byte, or 8 bits. 1 byte, consisting of 256 (28) values is the smallest allocation size in a storage device. Boolean logic gate: evaluate the validity of a statement.