Content and Learning Objectives

The topics in this chapter encompass some helpful background from the history of computing, mathematical concepts, and computer science.

After working through this chapter, you should be able to:

• sketch the history of commonly used operating systems

• explain intuitively what graphs are

• enumerate some applications of graphs in computer science and economics

• explain how files are organised on disk

• point out the difference between Unix-based file system and the Windows file system

• describe what a floating point number is

• explain why computing with floating point numbers leads to imprecision