References: EE380 Introduction (Chapter 1)

To familiarize everyone with the "guts" of a computer, I like to begin with a guided tour through the parts of a PC. There are lots of similar walk-throughs available on the WWW and elsewhere. Here is a nice little 2-page PDF overview that I found on the WWW. I've also collected a few overview diagrams showing what's inside a modern PC and processor.

The book gives a reasonable introduction and defines a lot of terminology; you should be aware of those terms. You also should recall physically what these things look like from that very first day when we opened a PC. The following links provide additional history references.

• The History of Computing assembled by the IEEE Computer Society in 1996. Of particular interest is the timeline given as a PDF file.
• Another good history site is The Computer Museum History Center. This one only goes to 1990.
• Blinkenlights has a cute little summary of the history of personal computing.
• Intel's Processor Hall of Fame discusses only their chips, but is a nice little slice of the history of microprocessors. (The Intel 4004 is generally accepted as the first microprocessor.) Note that Intel frequently re-arranges their site, so the link above breaks on a regular basis.... :-(
• On a more personal note, when supercomputer manufacturers started dropping like flies, I wrote Is Parallel processing Dead?, which gives an interesting overview of how a bunch of companies imploded.
• Tom's Hardware maintains a very impressive collection of info about processors; it began as "The Mother of All CPU Charts," summarizing 111 processors and their performance on 3330 benchmarks (30 for each processor). The ultimate table of processor specs also was there, listing clock rates, transistor complexities, die sizes, power, etc. The latest version is interactive.