How do you go from some silicon wafer with some metallic lines printed on it to having a GUI desktop. I don’t understand the intersection between hardware and software at the fundamental level.
In: Technology
Let’s build from the bottom up. A diode is a section of silicon with 2 impurities added. One with extra electrons and one with a lack of electrons. This causes a region in the middle where the extra electrons flow into the lack of electrons. The uneven charges makes a kind of gap. In one direction, electricity can easily jump over this gap but in the other direction, the electricity pulls the gap further apart and it can’t. Slap 2 diodes together and you get a transistor. This allows electricity to flow from one end to the other but only if the middle section has electricity applied. Now you have a switch. Put 2 together and you have an “and” gate. Electricity can only flow if both middle parts have electricity applied. Now you add a whole bunch of similar things together and we get to the high level logic. The computer has a registry. Each entry is full of 1s and 0s. These relate to what logic gates get activated and what values are fed into them. There’s a “program counter” that is connected to the first entry then walks through them one at a time. Sometimes it jumps around if the value in the entry tells it to go to some other entry. Any further explanation will take hours but that’s the basic idea. You load a list with on off bits. That list determines what circuits get turned on and what bits get connected to those circuits. Do that like a billion times and you get a computer.
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