ELI5. If a computer is made up of preprogrammed circuits, then how does it display anything on its screen, even if that particular thing hasn’t been preprogrammed in its circuits?

Question

ELI5. If a computer is made up of preprogrammed circuits, then how does it display anything on its screen, even if that particular thing hasn’t been preprogrammed in its circuits?

In: Technology

Answer 1

It might be easiest to think of computer circuits as hardcoded ways to transform or change voltages (data). The input data you give it can be different, and therefor the output data can be different. You get different images on screen in a word processor by typing different characters on your keyboard, and the data of “you pressed a Y” is combined and transformed with a bunch of other data (“you are in a word document” for example) to eventually arrive at the output data “turn on these pixels”