Charles Petzold - “Code. Secret language of computer science "

It just so happened that recently more and more people who have been educated in completely different specialties are engaged in programming. Yes, and universities are increasingly moving away from low-level languages. And it turns out that so many programmers have absolutely no idea how computers actually work and what happens there outside of their IDE. And it happens that in our youth, we simply do not pay attention to these subjects at the institute, considering that all these assemblers have already outlived their own, and Java will defeat everyone.
This book was created in order to fill the gaps in education or simply to remind how it really is. Together with the author, we go from various methods of encoding information (Braille, Morse code) to modern operating systems with graphical interfaces.
Along the way, we will learn how to build the simplest, but quite a computer of 5 million relays and a small number of light bulbs, how then to replace them with vacuum tubes, and then with transistors. What is a machine code language for the 8080 processor and why coprocessors were used. We learn how fractions and pixels are represented in the computer's memory and write the simplest assembler programs. The main part of the book is devoted to this low-level part.
Well, in the last chapters, the author very quickly goes through all kinds of peripheral devices, such as a scanner, MIDI sequencers and printers.
It is recommended for reading to everyone who is somehow involved in programming and wants to know better what is happening inside this smart piece of iron.