Quotes from Charles Petzold

Just as Morse code provides a good introduction to the nature of codes, the telegraph provides a good introduction to the hardware of the computer.

communication simply requires

If you want your appliance to work right, it's a good idea to install the batteries correctly with the plus signs facing the right way.

Escape codes let you "escape" from the humdrum, routine interpretation of a sequence of codes and move to a new interpretation. As we'll see in later chapters, shift codes and escape codes are common when written languages are represented by binary codes.

a digital design engineer, you would spend long hours going through the TTL Data Book familiarizing yourself with the types of TTL chips that were available. Once you knew all your tools, you could actually build the computer I showed in Chapter 17 out of TTL chips. Wiring the chips together is a lot easier than wiring individual transistors

In 1914 the German government asked prominent scientists and artists to sign a declaration refuting the "lies and slanders of the enemy". Hilbert could not determine whether these statements made about Germany were true (a rather political Entscheidung problem), so he refused to sign.

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven