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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2023
Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the hardware and software of modern computers. It begins by putting computation in a historical context, thereby showing that computation has been a concern of humanity for millennia. Unsurprisingly, modern computers have been foreshadowed by much older calculating devices designed to meet human needs. The chapter also examines operating systems for the efficient management of computer resources and hardware and software abstractions helpful to understanding computers, such as file systems, virtual memories, and high-level programming languages. The important topics of password security, social engineering, and malicious software are introduced as well as techniques to find and remove malware. Although one might expect that hardware would not exhibit security vulnerabilities, that is false. This is illustrated by a subtle bug introduced in the 1990s to make computers run faster by allowing some instructions to be executed out of order but only shown in 2018 to be a serious security hazard.
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