Didn’t we really just trick rocks into thinking? I can’t wrap my head around it
Edit: computer as in gaming computer
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The first computers were mechanical devices. Say we have to do a very complex math problem, repeatedly, and as quickly as possible. (For example, it’s 1941 and we need to figure out the how to aim the guns of a massive warship given the relative speed and direction of an enemy ship; how do we do that complex trigonometry problem as fast as possible?) A mechanical computer uses mechanical parts like levers and dials to represent values, and their mechanical relationships can be built such that you can do math with those values. If you only need to do one or two types of math problems, this is feasible with mechanical parts and fast enough.
But what if you could represent any arbitrary number, and do any arbitrary math with those numbers? Then you could do a lot more with your mechanical computer. Such a computer had actually been built all the way back in 1833 by Charles Babbage – it was just monstrously expensive, huge, and inconvenient, because every number had to be represented by a whole set of metal gears, and data and mathematical functions entered by use of punch cards.
The next breakthrough came with vacuum tubes. The specifics of how they work doesn’t really matter, but suffice to say that they allow you to switch a current on or off, via input of another current. So they can function as an all-electric switch – one electric circuit can turn another on or off. So this greatly simplifies and speed’s up Babbage’s difference engine – because electric circuits are way faster than mechanical gears.
But even this kind of sucks. The tubes are big and fragile and fail often, and you need like 5,000 of them to get a very useful computer. In 1947 thanks to engineers at Bell Labs, we get the transistor: take a tiny bit of a semi-conductor material like silicon in a specific arrangement and you get everything that the vacuum tube does. Essentially this is a tiny little electric switch that can be on or off. So with enough of them, you can represent any arbitrary number and do any arbitrary math with them. This is the basis of all modern computers: using an array of thousands of tiny silicon switches to do math. Because silicon can etched into on a microscopic level, we can make processors that contain billions of transistors.
There are a couple of other questions here, like how to sort out computer memory. But that’s the gist of it, you “teach a rock to think” by splitting it up into a ten billion tiny electric switches and then carefully turning them on and off.
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