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
It starts with setting up a binary system. You can do it anyway you like, but binary (two possible states per signal) is robust and works well with electricity. You define for example 5V to be 1 and 0V to be 0. Then you get a bunch of logic gates. The basic building block for a logic gate is transistors. For example, an AND gate outputs a 1 if both inputs are 1, and 0 otherwise.
Now put a bunch of gates together and add a clock signal. Now you can feed sequences of 1’s and 0’s into your logic network at the pace of the clock. You can make a network that lights a little lamp every time the sequence “0011” is fed into the network. You can make the sequence “1100” light a different lamp. You can make the sequence “0000” turn off both lamps. You can make “1111” mean do nothing.
0011 1100 1111 1111 0000
According to what we’ve defined, the above would essentially be a software, a program. It would turn on lamp 1, turn on lamp 2, wait for two cycles, then turn off both lamps.
That’s how software interfaces with hardware.
Then keep improving the system over 50 years together with hundreds of thousands of other developers, and you arrive at a modern computer!
This area of expertise is called digital technology. As a fun fact: you don’t actually need electronics to make a digital computer. You can do it with literally anything that can transfer energy in any way. Sticks and levers, fluids, falling objects, sound waves. The reason we use electronics is because electrons are unbelievably tiny while still being able to carry a lot of power, while also moving that power at almost the speed of light. This allows us to make our circuits small in turn, and circuit size is directly tied to the maximum speed the circuit can operate at.
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