Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is a book by Charles Petzold, published in 2009. This Waffle podcast explores the book across 7 episodes.

How do Morse code, Braille, and the telegraph show that communication needs both a well-designed code and a physical system that can reliably carry it? Why are two states enough to represent numbers, messages, and logical decisions—and how do switches and relays turn those representations into working circuits? How do logic gates become an eight-bit adding machine, and how does two's complement let it handle negative numbers and subtraction while creating the possibility of overflow? How does feeding outputs back into inputs create clocks, counters, and memory—and how can individual stored bits become an addressable RAM array? What turns an automated adding machine into a programmable computer, and how does the multiplication program reveal the roles of instructions, memory, flags, and conditional jumps? What does a processor on a silicon chip still need to become a complete computer that can exchange text, display it, and preserve information after the power goes off? How do operating systems, programming languages, and graphical interfaces let people work with computers without managing every byte and hardware operation themselves?

These episodes are AI-generated adaptations grounded in the book. Listen to the first episode here and continue the series in the Waffle app.