Scott Hanselman

New YouTube Series: Computer things they didn't teach you in school

November 08, 2019 Comment on this post [17] Posted in Musings
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OK, fine maybe they DID teach you this in class. But, you'd be surprised how many people think they know something but don't know the background or the etymology of a term. I find these things fascinating. In a world of bootcamp graduates, community college attendees (myself included!), and self-taught learners, I think it's fun to explore topics like the ones I plan to cover in my new YouTube Series "Computer things they didn't teach you."

BOOK RECOMMENDATION: I think of this series as being in the same vein as the wonderful "Imposter's Handbook" series from Rob Conery (I was also involved, somewhat). In Rob's excellent words: "Learn core CS concepts that are part of every CS degree by reading a book meant for humans. You already know how to code build things, but when it comes to conversations about Big-O notation, database normalization and binary tree traversal you grow silent. That used to happen to me and I decided to change it because I hated being left out. I studied for 3 years and wrote everything down and the result is this book."

Of course it'll take exactly 2 comments before someone comments with "I don't know what crappy school you're going to but we learned this stuff when they handed us our schedule." Fine, maybe this series isn't for you.

In fact I'm doing this series and putting it out there for me. If it helps someone, all the better!

In this first video I cover the concept of Carriage Returns and Line Feeds. But do you know WHY it's called a Carriage Return? What's a carriage? Where did it go? Where is it returning from? Who is feeding it lines?

What would you suggest I do for the next video in the series? I'm thinking Unicode, UTF-8, BOMs, and character encoding.


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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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November 13, 2019 7:53
Just to be a little picky about the typewriter. The metal bar does the line feed and carriage return. You could also set it to advance 1 or 2 lines (or more) when pushed. When the carriage reached the end of the line after typing, you would push the bar, which would do the line feeds, and then continue pushing the bar, which would force the carriage to return to the beginning of the carriage to start typing the new line. If you gave the bar a small push, it just did the line feed without returning the carriage to start position. The roller was used to position the paper to any vertical position, which was very useful when filling out forms.

When programming a DOS terminal screen if you just put in a line feed, it would move the cursor down to the next line and the next characters would be written there. If a CR was written alone the next character would be written at the start of the line you are on.

It is possible on a manual typewriter to do a carriage return without a line feed by pushing the left of the carriage just below where the metal bar meets the carriage.
November 13, 2019 10:12
"What would you suggest I do for the next video in the series?" I thought of unicode, UTF and you mentioned the same :) Lot of people get confused about it. I am waiting for this.
November 13, 2019 10:43
I don't know what crappy school you're going to but we learned this stuff when they handed us our schedule.
November 13, 2019 11:28
In my school (around 1982 ... boy I'm old) printers had carriages that needed to return, and lines to be fed. So naturally we learned about that.

But I have no clue why they didn't teach us anything about Unicode then...

So was that a crappy school ?
November 13, 2019 12:01
Hmm... For the next episode, you ask? Well, I really want to know why Microsoft is using the term "boot partition" for a partition that does NOT contain the bootloader and "system partition" for a partition that does NOT contain the system root!

Maybe... talk the origin of ".NET". That's your area, right?

Of course, there is always the simpler topic of "why do we refer to the web platform (CSS3, SVG, JavaScript, etc.) as HTML5?" The answer is the phenomenon of metonymy in the English language. It is for the same reason that the term "Win32" is used to refer to the whole body of Microsoft's unmanaged code API.

If you want something more difficult, try this: Why does Microsoft use the metonymic "x86" tag for 32-bit Windows SKUs instead of the official "IA-32", or the technically correct "i386" tag that Microsoft was already using until the time of Windows Vista?

If you're looking for something more technical, maybe the origin of the "DWord"/"QWord" data types.
November 13, 2019 13:00
Would love to hear some tales about clever hacks used on old hardware, like how they got x to work on 286 etc. Other cool topic would be why modern CPUs still boot in 16 bit real mode with 1MB memory limit.
PCh
November 13, 2019 13:30
Great! :D

I would request a video about why floating point numbers in general are imprecise. (IEEE encoding and all). As it's a thing that many developers overlook and wonder why their code comparing their float variables to e.g. 0 doesn't work.
November 13, 2019 16:34
Great video!

To be honest I can't really explain in detail the difference between 32 and 64-bit architecture. So a deeper dive into that would be interesting to see.
November 13, 2019 17:27

In this first video I cover the concept of Carriage Returns and Line Feeds. But do you know WHY it's called a Carriage Return? What's a carriage? Where did it go? Where is it returning from? Who is feeding it lines?


Am I the only one who thought of "Who's line is it anyway" at that point :D
November 13, 2019 17:55
I never studied Computer Science either. When I was a teenager I read The New Turing Omnibus by AK Dewdney which I loved and which taught me a lot. It's a collection of columns from Scientific American addressing computer science topics for the non-expert, with coding/maths challenges, written by a computer science lecturer. You do need to concentrate - don't skim-read it unless you already know CS.

"Wonderfully concise discussions . . . full of wit . . . It is nearly the perfect book for the noncomputer scientists who want to learn something about the field." --Nature
November 14, 2019 12:03
There are already great videos on youtube explaining unicode/utf8/16/32
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4

And same about floating point imprecision as suggested in the comments above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZRI1IfStY0"

No need to make the same content twice with a different narrator :)
November 14, 2019 21:52
The first video was really interesting from a historical perspective. Associating the carriage return with an actual typewriter made my geek mind that much smarter.

I would personally love some more hardware topics and topics related to the low-level functioning of the web.

What really happens when you open your browser, type a URL and hit enter? Everyone knows the basic DNS query, Http Get, the Web server returns a result and browser renders it stuff but few actually understand and know the history of OSPF protocols and how they actually work. We recently used Dijkstra for an AI-based project so knowing this stuff helps even today in real-world projects.

But then I am a self-thought programmer who didn't go to a formal engineering college so I wouldn't know if that's something they actually teach in schools. But it might still make an interesting topic though.
November 15, 2019 1:53
Great video!

thanks
November 15, 2019 3:47
Two sources to consult - The Jargon File and Encyclopedia of Computer Science (1978 version) if you want to know the details.

I had one 3 hour course for 2 semesters in college on computer history covering everything from before 1900 to 1979 which helped immensely.

It helps to tag new technologies like gRPC (2015) as rediscoveries of the original technology - 1981 C language IDL files.

Nestor, William Allan. Wulf, David Alex Lamb, IDL, Interface Description Language, Technical Report, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1981

I'd expect IDL to be based on a much older EDI specification pre-dating ANSI X12.
Bob
November 15, 2019 5:34
Should I download 32-bit version or 64-bit of this software?
Boy, if I had a nickel every time I heard that! Love to see and hear a deep-dive on this from you, specially in a format of teaching a kid in a primary school :)
November 20, 2019 2:48
How about algorithmic complexity and how to read O notation?
November 21, 2019 18:19
Very interesting, thank you! I will use this at my Institute.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.