What You Need To Know About Computers I still remember the day in August of 1995 when a certain software company released a new version of their operating system, a significantly revamped release which promised to change the face of the computing scene forever; And indeed, it did just that. On that day, reading about the new features of the revolutionary OS, I felt the impending doom of my hobby/prospective career as a computer techie. It seemed that computers, as a whole, were becoming more automated. In the old days, computers did not have simple interfaces and needed skilled operators to use them; Gradually, they became somewhat more user-friendly, but still needed someone pretty knowledgeable to perform basic tweaks like adjusting your memory configuration. But at that point in history, I believe that the day was imminent in which computers would become almost entirely self-regulating, obviating the need for a skilled technician in most cases. I began to search for a new career field, believing that there would soon be no money in my field. But as time went on, the trend of increasing user-friendliness began to take on new and interesting facets. Foremost among them was the apparent trend of corporate domination; As the Internet continued to grow in mass popularity and operating systems became increasingly elephantine and incomprehensible beasts, users seemed to be losing control over their computers, and the computers (or perhaps more specifically, the companies which manufactured those computers) seemed to be reversing the role, controlling the user rather than the other way around, by spying on the user's browsing habits and preventing them from having direct control over many aspects of their computers. Although this was largely a software trend propagated by inflexible operating systems, it was also propagated in hardware, by hardware companies manufacturing non-standard, under-documented hardware that was deliberately difficult to reverse-engineer to the user's own preferences. I began to realize that there was a need for people who understood computers on a truly fundamental level; Someday, the time might come when people would have to piece together their own computers so they'd know exactly what went into them, and would be able to control those computers the way the original hackers of MIT did with their machines. There was a need to know not only basics like how to partition a hard disk or make a web page in pure HTML, but to actually make a computer from ICs and raw machine language code. How much do you really know about computers? In the computer world, there are many different levels of user knowledge; Some people believe themselves to be knowledgeable because they can clear their web browser's cache or format a floppy. Others know multiple programming languages and believe they still know very little of all there is to know. The latter group are closer to the truth; As with many other things in life, the more you know, the more you realize how little you know. Do you know electronics? You need to know the pinouts (and ideally, the schematics) for every chip that goes into a computer, including the CPU, the RAM, the ROM (BIOS), the chipset, and the various other "glue" chips that piece these discrete parts together. You need to know how to make a modem, how to make a monitor, how to make a printer, and how to make a scanner, from nothing more than raw materials like steel, plastic, and sand. Do you know programing? I don't mean programming in BASIC or even C or Fortran; You need to know bit-level programming, the specifics of how to make a BIOS and an operating system, from scratch, from absolutely no code at all. Do you know communications? You need to know how IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP, PPP, HDLC, ATM, and Frame Relay work, at the bit-by-bit level. Until you know all these things, you don't really know computers. Until you can make a whole computer from materials buried in your own backyard, you won't *really* be a computer expert. There's always more to learn out there. The world needs people who can contribute to society as a whole by really understanding how these machines work, and not just bowing to control by a few megacorporations that make the hardware and software that make up the computer. If you want to be a computer techie, you need to learn all you can. Of course, if you're not a computer person and you just want to be an end-user, well, there are plenty of other fields that need similarly knowledgeable experts too...