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
So, all the metal lines on the silicon wafer are basically wires, and electric energy flows though them. At one spot, the CPU, the electric is switched either on or off (binary: 1 or 0) in super-fast succession (or, in muli-core CPUs, multiple super-fast switches working together). The on-off pattern is interpreted by other parts of the computer to tell each component what to do. Sections of that data get grouped (e.g. 100101010 might mean Green on the display) and tell each component what to do.
The software does that interpreting. It’s just sections of electric/no electric that tell the CPU how to sort that electric and tells each other part what they mean. It’s usually stored on a hard drive, but firmware can also be component-specific.
Imagine a million 1/0 digits all lined up, with a software program on the hard drive telling each part of the computer what each section of code means and thus what to do with it. Each pixel on your screen gets a value, electric switched by the CPU with the software telling that code to go to the monitor and meaning this pixel is green and this one is blue and this one is white, etc. That’s how a graphic user interface is made, and it’s a convenient way to represent those gajillions of different instructions being sent around and about in super-fast speeds.
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