Course Outline

  1. The Computer Revolution: Historical development of the PC (1 week)
  2. Hardware (2 weeks)
    1. CPU Architecture
    2. Address and Data lines
    3. Interrupts
    4. Pipelining
    5. Cache
    6. RISC vs. CISC
    7. ALU, FPP, MMX and SSE
    8. RAM/ROM
    9. Internal and external bus design (local bus, PCI, AGP)
    10. Memory allocation and management
    11. Memory addressing schemes
    12. Multiprocessing algorithms
    13. Interfaces
    14. I/O and storage devices
    15. Graphics (hardware, resolution, color depth, etc.)
  3. Software (2 weeks)
    1. Instruction hierarchy
    2. Program interpretation and execution
    3. Data representation (ASCII, Unicode, graphics, music, and video)
    4. The role of the operating System
    5. Windows 9x architecture
    6. Windows memory management
    7. Data exchange DDE vs. OLE
  4. Programming Methodologies (1½  weeks)
    1. Programming abstraction (APIs, MFC)
    2. Multiplatform development (simulators, virtual machines)
    3. Java vs. Active-X
    4. Security issues
  5. Networking (3 weeks)
    1. Mode of use (servers vs. file sharing, distributed databases)
    2. Peer-to-peer architectures
    3. Client-server architectures
    4. Point-to-point vs. packet based networks
    5. ISO/OSI model
    6. Network operating systems
    7. Topologies, cabling and protocols
    8. Switches and routers
    9. TCP/IP (addressing and protocols)
    10. LANs and WANs
    11. Internet (historical development and architecture)
    12. Internet applications (Telnet, FTP, USENET, SMTP/POP, WWW)
    13. MIME
    14. WIFI and Bluetooth
    15. Video Conferencing
    16. SOHO/Home networking issues
  6. Social issues (2 weeks)
    1. Legal, ethical and moral issues
    2. Copyright
    3. Privacy
    4. SPAM
    5. Free speech vs. Filtering
    6. Viruses, Trojan horses and worms
    7. Computing limits – artificial intelligence – A historical approach
  7. Communication (PC to PC, PC to mainframe) (1 week)
    1. Simulators
    2. Communication parameters
    3. Modems and broadband
  8. Compression (1½ weeks)
    1. Lossless vs. lossy
    2. Symmetric vs. asymmetric
    3. RLE
    4. Huffman coding
    5. Review of popular multimedia CODECS