Charles Petzold - “Code. The secret language of computer science "

It so happened that in recent years, more and more people who have received education in completely different specialties are engaged in programming. And in universities, they are increasingly moving away from low-level languages. And it turns out that very many programmers have absolutely no idea how computers actually work and what happens there outside their IDE. And it happens that in our early years, 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 win all.
This book was created in order to fill the gaps in education or just to remind how it really is. Together with the author, we go from different ways of coding information (Braille, Morse code) to modern operating systems with graphical interfaces.
Along the way, we will learn how to build a simple, but quite a computer of 5 million relays and a small number of light bulbs, how to replace them with vacuum tubes, and then with transistors. What is the machine code language for the 8080 processor and why were coprocessors used. We find out how fractions and pixels are represented in the computer's memory and write the simplest programs in assembler. The main part of the book is devoted to this low-level part.
Well, in the last chapters, the author very quickly passes through all sorts of peripheral devices, such as a scanner, MIDI-sequencers and printers.
It is recommended for reading to anyone who is somehow involved in programming and wants to know better what is going on inside this smart piece of hardware.