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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We figured out how to build a *huge* number of cleverly connected switches really cheaply.
A switch (on/off) has two states, so it can represent binary numbers (usually called “0” and “1”). So anything we can do with binary math we can do with switches. And, since we know how to translate between binary math and any other math, we can do any math we want. In addition, you can express logic statements (true/false) the same way. So we can design “logic operations”, analogous to math operations, and do logical things with switches too.
Now it’s “just” a matter of stacking up switches. *Anything* we can reduce to math and logic can be done by a sufficient number of switches, if we just have enough of them.
So we figured out, a long time ago, what arrangements of switches do simple things like add two numbers, or decide if one number is bigger than another, or things like that. Those are little modules. We can wire up modules to do more complicated things.
And we learned “stereolithograpy”, which is a way to very cheaply manufacturer billions of switches and wires at a time.
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