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Anon thinks about CPUs
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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I'm still stuck on how you get from "switch go on, switch go off" to, well, anything
One Switch can have two states. Switch on is a 1 and switch off is a 0. Group 8 switches together and you get a byte. Miniaturize the switches and put 8 trillion of them into the size of a fingernail, and ta-da you have a 1TB micro SD card.
Wire up two switches so that a light bulb only will go on when both switches are on (1). This wiring creates an AND gate. Adjusting the wiring so that if either of the switches are on, the light turns on. This wiring is an OR gate.
Channing the output of the lightbulb and treating it like a new switch allows you to combine enough AND and OR gates to make other logic blocks, NOT, NAND, XOR, etc.
Combine enough logic blocks and you can wire up a circuit so that you can add the value of two switches together, and now you can start to perform addition.
This all naturally evolves to the point where you can play Skyrim with the most degenerate porn mods.
I like your explanation, but i dont understand it. Keep up the good work.
This game may help, but I didn't play it myself (yet)
In addition to Turing Complete, which is really good, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is a fantastic book that literally goes from two kids trying to talk to each other at night with flashlights, to a fully working Z80 clone, while not being hard to understand and using a really good conversational teaching method. It's how I figured out a lot about CPU design, microarchitectures, assembly and machine langauge and a lot of other things.
Simply put, the switching doesn't do anything by itself. It's the meaning we assign to the arrangement of on-off switches. Much like flag signals, the flags don't do anything besides be visible and locatable. Yet, we can establish a communication protocol with flags, lights, fingers on a hand, etc. this signaling is done electronically with many layers of meaning and complexity, and nowadays at unfathomable scale and speed.
Watch this. It's a guy who shows how computers work using dominoes. It really helps explain how calculating something works at its most fundamental level
Transistors (electrically activated diodes) allow for logic gates. Logic gates allow for wild bullshit