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 ya know how movies and stuff like to portray 0s and 1s floating around inside computers? Well, there aren’t zeros and ones inside the computer anywhere. You could take an arbitrarily powerful microscope, zoom in as much as you want and you won’t ever see 0s or 1s floating around anywhere. The 1s represent a physical charge, the 0s represent lack of a physical charge.
Those 0s and 1s are just ways to portray a very very tiny thing being charged or lacking a charge. It’s maybe worth noting that it isn’t always a charge that’s being talked about, but this is ELI5 and I don’t want to overcomplicate it.
Humans can look at these groups of charge/lack of charge as 1s and 0s because it’s easier for us to work with and allows us to view things at different levels of abstraction depending on what layer of the computer we’re considering: the groups of charged/uncharged transistors get represented as a sequence of 0s and 1s, every so many 0s and 1 can be represented as a hexadecimal number, every so many hexadecimal numbers can be represented as a machine-level instruction, groups of machine-level instructions can be represented as programming language lines, and groups of programming lines can be represented as apps or games or whatever else.
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