Introduction to Computing

I have to say it's all very exciting!

I couldn't make it for the first DITA session so I did some investigating and studying at home.

I read introduction notes and found interesting and useful information there; what is computer, digital information and binary numbers. I learned that computer consists of "Central Processing Unit", input and output devices, memory and external storage (as in von Neumann architecture). Simple as it is digital information is a combination of symbols which represents things in a way it will be understood by user. Binary digit is "bit" and is either 0 or 1. ASCII - a common encoding for text and is based on 7-bit. There are more different formats to represent pictures, videos, etc. for instance file and document.

After reading notes I transformed my living room to a lab and started experimenting.
Thanks to Andy MacFarlane guide lines the exercises were quite easy. I opened Notepad and saved it as a text document "weather.txt". Then I opened the text file in MS Word document and saved it as "weather.doc" After I had closed it I reopened the file with notepad application. What I got in front of me wasn't meaningful text but rather chaotic symbols. The notes explained that "many characters do not relate to ASCII so can not be interpreted meaningfully as text".
The next step asked me to open "weather.doc" and save it as HTML document. As a result I got new document saved as "weather.htm". I opened this document with Notepad application and once again there were no meaningful text.
The notes explained that these "tasks rely upon a file-centered view of information" and the following task was to introduce me to a document-centered view.
I opened my "weather.doc" document and inserted the picture. The new document I saved as "weather2.htm" Then I compared all the documents created.

It was absolutely new experience for me and I enjoyed and learned a lot.