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
The silicon wafer has billions of tiny switches on it. Some of those switches change depending on initial input, some of them change depending on the state of adjacent switches. With clever combinations of switches, you can do all sorts of math.
By doing math, you have taken an input signal and generated a different output signal. These input and output signals can do many things, one of those things is give coordinates of a pixel and values for the red, green and blue elements of that pixel.
So your gui is, at its most basic level, a very long list of coordinates and associated red, blue and green values for each of those coordinates.
That list and those values change in set ways depending on inputs it receives, such as a mouse click in a certain location. In this way, the gui can react to your inputs and achieve some manner of work.
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