Crash Course
Alan Turing: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we’re going to take a step back from programming and discuss the person who formulated many of the theoretical concepts that underlie modern computation - the father of computer science himself: Alan Turing. Now normally we try to...
Crash Course
The Internet and Computing: Crash Course History of Science
We’ve talked a lot about advances in biotech. But none of those could have happened without advances in computing. It’s time to get back to data and explore the unlikely birth, strange life, and potential futures of the Internet. In this...
SciShow
How Computers Revolutionized Space Travel
As computers have gotten more powerful, they’ve completely transformed how we explore the solar system. And along the way, the space industry has given computer science a boost too.
TED Talks
Karl Skjonnemand: The self-assembling computer chips of the future
The transistors that power the phone in your pocket are unimaginably small: you can fit more than 3,000 of them across the width of a human hair. But to keep up with innovations in fields like facial recognition and augmented reality, we...
TED Talks
The catastrophic risks of AI — and a safer path | Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio — the world's most-cited computer scientist and a "godfather" of artificial intelligence — is deadly concerned about the current trajectory of the technology. As AI models race toward full-blown agency, Bengio warns that...
Crash Course
The Singularity, Skynet, and the Future of Computing: Crash Course Computer Science
In our SERIES FINALE of Crash Course Computer Science we take a look towards the future! In the past 70 years electronic computing has fundamentally changed how we live our lives, and we believe it’s just getting started. From ubiquitous...
Crash Course
Psychology of Computing: Crash Course Computer Science
We’ve spent most of this series talking about computers. Which makes sense - this is Crash Course COMPUTER SCIENCE after all. But at their core computers are tools employed by humans and humans are pretty complicated. So today, we’re...
Crash Course
Advanced CPU Designs: Crash Course Computer Science
So now that we’ve built and programmed our very own CPU, we’re going to take a step back and look at how CPU speeds have rapidly increased from just a few cycles per second to gigahertz! Some of that improvement, of course, has come from...
Crash Course
Graphical User Interfaces: Crash Course Computer Science
Today, we're going to discuss the critical role graphical user interfaces, or GUIs played in the adoption of computers. Before the mid 1980's the most common way people could interact with their devices was through command line...
Crash Course
Registers and RAM: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we’re going to create memory! Using the basic logic gates we discussed in episode 3 we can build a circuit that stores a single bit of information, and then through some clever scaling (and of course many new levels of abstraction)...
Crash Course
Electronic Computing: Crash Course Computer Science
So we ended last episode at the start of the 20th century with special purpose computing devices such as Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines. But as the scale of human civilization continued to grow as did the demand for more...
Crash Course
Computer Vision: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we’re going to talk about how computers see. We’ve long known that our digital cameras and smartphones can take incredibly detailed images, but taking pictures is not quite the same thing. For the past half-century, computer...
Crash Course
Computer Networks: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we start a three episode arc on the rise of a global telecommunications network that changed the world forever. We’re going to begin with computer networks, and how they grew from small groups of connected computers on LAN networks...
Crash Course
Screens & 2D Graphics: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we begin our discussion of computer graphics. So we ended last episode with the proliferation of command line (or text) interfaces, which sometimes used screens, but typically electronic typewriters or teletypes onto paper. But by...
Crash Course
Files & File Systems: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we’re going to look at how our computers read and interpret computer files. We’ll talk about how some popular file formats like txt, wave, and bitmap are encoded and decoded giving us pretty pictures and lifelike recordings from...
Crash Course
How Computers Calculate - the ALU: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we're going to talk about a fundamental part of all modern computers. The thing that basically everything else uses - the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (or the ALU). The ALU may not have the most exciting name, but it is the...
Crash Course
The Personal Computer Revolution: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we're going to talk about the birth of personal computing. Up until the early 1970s components were just too expensive, or underpowered, for making a useful computer for an individual, but this would begin to change with the...
Crash Course
Natural Language Processing: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we’re going to talk about how computers understand speech and speak themselves. As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been an growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly...
Crash Course
The First Programming Languages: Crash Course Computer Science
So we ended last episode with programming at the hardware level with things like plugboards and huge panels of switches, but what was really needed was a more versatile way to program computers - software! For much of this series we’ve...
Crash Course
Keyboards & Command Line Interfaces: Crash Course Computer Science
Today, we are going to start our discussion on user experience. We've talked a lot in this series about how computers move data around within the computer, but not so much about our role in the process. So today, we're going to look at...
Crash Course
Memory & Storage: Crash Course Computer Science
So we’ve talked about computer memory a couple times in this series, but what we haven’t talked about is storage. Data written to storage, like your hard drive, is a little different, because it will still be there even if the power goes...
Crash Course
The Internet: Crash Course Computer Science
Today, we're going to talk about how the Internet works. Specifically, how that stream of characters you punch into your browser's address bar, like "youtube.com", return this very website. Just to clarify we're talking in a broader...
Crash Course
Early Programming: Crash Course Computer Science
Since Joseph Marie Jacquard’s textile loom in 1801, there has been a demonstrated need to give our machines instructions. In the last few episodes, our instructions were already in our computer’s memory, but we need to talk about how...
Crash Course
Hackers & Cyber Attacks: Crash Course Computer Science
Today we're going to talk about hackers and their strategies for breaking into computer systems. Now, not all hackers are malicious cybercriminals intent on stealing your data (these people are known as Black Hats). There are also White...