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
I recommend starting with these amazing videos by Sebastian Lague:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFt_AvWsXl0dPhqVsKt1Ni_46ARyiCGSq](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFt_AvWsXl0dPhqVsKt1Ni_46ARyiCGSq)
In the videos, he goes through, visually, and shows you how logic gates work. He uses a little program he wrote to make some gates, then combines them to make things like addition machines, data stores and such. In some videos, he even breadboards them so you can see them actually running in real life. He’s really really good at explaining these, so I recommend watching them first.
From then on, it ends up being layer on layer on layer. Every chip has these logic gates in them, and the right combination of gates lets the chips do things like store data or take electrical signals and make them into audio, or send electrical signals to the monitor which in turn has its own logic gates that turn pixels on and off.
It’s a bit like a car. Since the dawn of man people have made various inventions that get refined and miniaturized and repurposed by other people. Someone discovered stuff is flammable which in turn led to making metal which in turn led to making engines which in turn led to making a smaller engine which in turn led to.. and so on and so forth.
Computers are incredibly complex, if viewed as a whole, but once you realize “it’s all just logic gates”, you can start to hypothesize how a processor talks to your graphics card to tell it to turn on or read data or write data.
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