Computing

Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a computer was a person who computes. Since the advent of the electronic computer, it has come to also mean the operation and usage of these machines, the electrical processes carried out within the computer hardware itself. It does not denote the theoretical concepts of creating programs to run on the computers themselves, though there is a subset of computer science that deals with the original sense of computing mathematical calculations.

1 Science and theory
2 Hardware
- 2.1 Instruction-level taxonomies
3 Software
4 History of computing
5 Business computing
6 Human factors
7 Computer security
8 Data
9 Mechatronics
10 Classes of computers
11 Companies – current
12 Companies – historic
13 Professional organizations
14 Standards organizations and consortia
15 Miscellaneous

Science and theory

Computer science
Theory of computation
Computational models
DBLP, as of February 2005, now lists over 600 000 bibliographic entries on computer science and several thousand links to the home pages of computer scientists

Hardware

See information processor for a high-level block diagram.

Instruction-level taxonomies

After the commoditization of memory, attention turned to optimizing CPU performance at the instruction level. Various methods of speeding up the fetch-execute cycle include:

designing instruction set architectures with simpler, faster instructions: RISC as opposed to CISC
Superscalar instruction execution
VLIW architectures, which make parallelism explicit

Software

History of computing

Business computing

Human factors

Computer security

Cryptology – cryptography – information theory
Cracking – demon dialing – Hacking – war dialing – war driving
Social engineering – Dumpster diving
Physical security – Black bag job
Computer insecurity
Computer surveillance
defensive programming
malware
security engineering

Data

Numeric data

integral data types – bit, byte, etc.
real data types:
- Floating point (Single precision, Double precision, etc.)
- Fixed point
- Rational number
Decimal
- Binary-coded decimal (BCD)
- Excess-3 BCD (XS-3)
- Biquinary-coded decimal
representation: Binary – Octal – Decimal – Hexadecimal (hex)
Computer mathematics – Computer numbering formats -

Character data

storage: Character – String – Text – Plain text
- representation: ASCII – Unicode – Multibyte – EBCDIC (Widecharacter, Multicharacter) – Fieldata – Baudot