TK1104 - Digital Technology
Lecture script - a companion to the twelve lectures
A guidance to TK1104
This script accompanies the course TK1104 Digital Technology. Each chapter belongs to one lecture: Chapter 1 to Lecture 1, Chapter 2 to Lecture 2, and so on, and each is followed in the same week by its guided Practice session. The slides shown in the lectures carry the same structure, so slides, script and exercises can be used side by side.
The chapters were drafted with the help of a large language model (Anthropic’s Claude), working from the lecturer’s slide decks and notes, and were reviewed and edited by the lecturer before publication. Drafting this way is fast but not infallible: If something looks wrong, it may well be - say so in the lecture or on Canvas, and it will be checked and corrected.
In this course, the lectures themselves are the curriculum - the exam will not ask for book-only material. The script therefore does something simple but useful: It re-tells each lecture in connected prose, slowly enough to be read, so that you can prepare a lecture before it happens and reconstruct it afterwards without deciphering bullet points. The recommended textbook - Fox, Information Technology, 2nd edition - adds depth where you want it; the short per-lecture reading (15–30 minutes) is listed in Readings.xlsx on Canvas.
Scattered through the chapters you will find a few grey boxes headed Excursus. They draw on textbooks that generations of computer-science students grew up with - Tanenbaum and Austin’s Structured Computer Organization, Tanenbaum and Bos’s Modern Operating Systems, and, for the networking chapters, Dostálek and Kabelová’s Understanding TCP/IP - and they supply background, history and the occasional deeper “why” behind something the lecture states. Read them for perspective and enjoyment: They are not exam material, and skipping them costs you nothing on the multiple-choice paper. The blue boxes headed Worked exercise are the opposite: Small worked tasks - convert this, encode that, build this gate - placed right next to the technique they practise, each with its compact solution. Do them with the solution covered; they are the stepping stones to each chapter’s self-check, and the self-checks are the stepping stones to the exam.
Lecture 12 (exam preparation) is delivered live in the final session and has no chapter of its own in this script; Chapter 11 closes the written part.
A practical suggestion from someone who once learned from a script very much like this one: Read a chapter with a pen. Mark what is obvious, mark what is not, and bring the second list to the lecture. That is the cheapest exam preparation you will ever do.
Every page of this script has a dark mode: Use the toggle in the navigation bar to switch between the light and the dark theme. The setting is remembered as you move between chapters.
Timo Amling, 2026