Learning Computers And Science?

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I so identify with this.

I have just started learning Python, with my nearly 13 year old son, and we are also doing some reading around "Computer Science" ... ( lots of Wiki and "How Stuff Works" for the moment :lol ).

.. because it just reached that point, after several years of my using the net, and several years of my son playing video games, and creating/designing his own on paper including all the myriad complex stats/values for the gameplay in them, and joining game creation sites/MMORPGs like Atmosphir and Sploder etc, and trying and failing to understand how to use the Construction Kits that came with Crysis, Morrowind, etc ...

... if there was one main burning crucial reason why my son should continue home-un-schooling ( apart from the fact that it takes less than 20 hours a week to cover "school-subjects" for the end of year "control/tests", rather than the 40+ hours in/at/on school/college plus homework ), then it had to be his learning at least one programming language and about how computers work, ( because game-creation is pretty much all that interests him ) ... and so I would have to find out too!! ! :lol ...

And the Python is coming along nicely, ( we're following a book bought from Amazon and referring to a couple of free online Python tutorials at same time for back-up/different "models" of explanation ) ... and we're picking up some info about operating systems, and motherboards, and RAM, and some history about it all, punch tapes/cards, ancient calculating machines, bits/bytes and the holes in the punch cards etc etc etc ...

... but we too still don't understand how holes in a punch card or zeros and ones are turned into programming language and vice-versa.

We have read a bit about ALGOL and the way programming language was broken up into language to the user, language to the computer, and reference language, etc ... and are beginning to see what syntax is about etc ... BUT I've begun to feel frustrated that the Python language tutorials don't explain or include the programming for "print", or "input" or "int" or all the other "functions" etc, all the various "sort-of-modules" like that, which we keep "calling"/typing/"paste"-ing into programming statements ... .

What is the actual *program* for "print" for instance ... and what are the programs for all the individual statements which make up *those* "lesser/lower" programs, and the programs behind those and and ... ??? How did the first ever program start? What *was* the first ever program? How many lines was it? Did it consist simply and solely of lots of 0's and 1's? What did it 'program"/make the computer do? ...

I realise that the first program(s) might in a sense simply be a circuit board ... with a string/sequence of electrical logic gates ... but would like to read/see an example of the first bit of *language* based on that? ... How do the *languages"/codes connect up with the circuit board etc?

Why do you want to know this and what do you want to be able to do with the knowledge?

The problem is that there is a number of systems involved and you don't necessarily need to know the details of all the systems to work with one of the others. For example, most software developers don't know much about how computer hardware works (and they don't really need to).

Roughly, there are these four levels that build on each other:
1) Hardware (keyboard and other periphery, mainboard, CPU, memory ...)
2) BIOS (sort of an abstraction layer between Hardware and operating system)
3) Operating system (e.g. Windows or Linux)
4) Application software (e.g. Word or Firefox)

Your question touches on all of these subsystems, so you might need to know:
- how does your keyboard register key presses, how does it send it to the computer (e.g. USB), how does the mainboard register the keypress, how does the CPU work, how does the display work? (if you're interested in hardware)
- how does the operating system handle key presses? (if you want to know about the OS)
- how does an application process input, how do I write source code to handle input? (if you want to know about software development)

You can take any of these topics and will find there is a lot of complexity there, the deeper you go, the more details there are to know about.

So I want to understand how HTTP works. I already know I can use notepad, and save it as a file, and this looks like a weblink on my desktop(depending on where I send the file to when I save it). I try with the "webpage I created(really a file)" but I cant post it anywhere without an error. I want to know what am I doing wrong to get this error? (Am I missing a step from creating a notepad file to making it a webpage?)
And I want to know how the computer knows the commands to make the "webpage" I tried to make?(ALL the processes*, sorry Im a nerdette Very Happy)

HTTP will download a page over the internet (that's why browsers use it). If you make a webpage in notepad, to view it just save it as .htm and open it with your browser.

BTW Does anyone even use notepad for webpages anymore?

HTTP will download a page over the internet (that's why browsers use it). If you make a webpage in notepad, to view it just save it as .htm and open it with your browser.

Notepad shouldn't be used for anything other than quick notes anyway. It's feature set is not exactly made for developers.

Take a look at this one instead: Notepad++

Agreed, Notepad++ is great-especially when you don't know what language you'll be using ahead of time, or you're using an obscure one with no supported IDE.