Sat. June 1st: Today I Learned: The Simple Computer

The Human Computer

Please join us this Saturday June 1st at 2pm at Sudo Room (2141 Broadway, entrance on 22nd St., upstairs) for the FREE workshop “Today I Learned: The Simple Computer.”

Perhaps you’ve heard of the 0’s and the 1’s. Perhaps you’ve heard of bits and bytes.

But how do the 0’s and 1’s tell your computer to do things?

How do we go from 0’s and 1’s to lolcats and code? How does the little box of plastic and circuits do anything at all?

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Want to have the most basic introduction to what a computer is and how it works? We will break a computer down to its most basic concept and answer any and all questions you will have (dumb questions, smart questions, normal questions – all questions are welcome!).

Finally, we will take what we’ve learned and build a very simple computer! If we have enough folks come, we will BUILD A COMPUTER OUT OF HUMANS (WHAT?!)(YES.).

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Specifically, during this “Today I Learned” workshop we will talk about:

  • binary math and boolean logic
  • half & full adders made of water, marbles, rocks, dominos, people…
  • A very simple computer architecture with 64 bytes of memory and 4 instructions

This workshop is part of the series “Today I Learned,” a series of free workshops that take place every Saturday at 2PM at Sudo Room, a creative community and hackerspace in downtown Oakland. Check out the full schedule at http://sudoroom.org/wiki/Today_I_Learned and please forward widely.