CST - 334: Week 1

 Write a 1 - 2 paragraph journal post, of at least 250 words, of what you learned this week in CST 334.

This week in CST - 334, I learned that there are various buses for sending bytes between the CPU, or the central processing unit, and the other components within the computer. These buses send bytes at varying speeds, where those that perform at the highest speeds are also the closest to the CPU. A few buses that are used in computer architecture include the memory bus, the general I/O bus, and the peripheral I/O bus. Additionally, I learned that there is a computer storage hierarchy where superiority is based on how fast the access time is for a specific data storage. Registers, for example, are at the top of the hierarchy and have a typical access time of 1 nanosecond, whereas magnetic tape is at the bottom and has a typical access time of 100 seconds. At first, it seems as though the slower the access time, the larger the storage capacity will be for the data storage, but magnetic tape typically has a slower access time than magnetic disk but can have a lower capacity at times. The material we learned this week also included details regarding programming in C. A few concepts that stood out to me include that strings in C are just arrays of characters that are null terminated, meaning the last element of any string in C will consist of a null symbol, ‘\0’.  Instead of using the keyword ‘new’ like C++ uses to dynamically allocate memory, C uses the function called ‘malloc’. It’s important to remember that the allocated memory will need to be released once it is done being used by calling the function called ‘free’.