I just don’t understand how putting elements, rocks, minerals or whatever computer parts are made of together can make something as complex as a computer.
How did we go from sticks and stones to having access to anything you want to know infront of you by pressing a couple buttons?
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The general strategy is “divide and conquer“.
How do we make sense of anything that’s too big and too complex to understand? We break it down into smaller and easier to understand parts.
And if that smaller sub-part is still too big and too complex to understand? Then we keep breaking that down to even smaller and simpler parts.
Keep doing this, and we will eventually arrive at a very large number of very basic parts, each one of them small and simple. But if we put them together in a certain way, then they “work as designed”.
But how does anyone understand each of those parts, and how to put them together in just the right way? The answer is there is not just one person, but a very large team of people, each an expert at their own specific thing.
They tell each other exactly what their specific thing does (this is called a Specification), and they make sure that whatever thing that come out of their factory does exactly what the specification says ( this is called Quality Assurance), so that everyone else can use their specific part, and trust that it works, to build something bigger and more complex.
So, in summary, in the design phase, we break down a big and complex design into smaller and simpler parts, and figure out how those smaller parts should work together. Then in the manufacturing phase, we do the opposite. We start by building the smallest and simplest parts. Test them to make sure that they work. Then assemble them to make something slightly bigger and more complex, and test to make sure that it works as expected. Then we repeat the process to make something more complex … and repeat until we get our final product.
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