Like how do they turn the electricity running through them into actual 1’s and 0’s and show all of that on my screen?
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To ELI5 that might take a hundred thousand words or so. Electrical signals aren’t turned into ones’s and zero’s they are ones’s and zero’s. Usually a high voltage (not actually that high like 3.3v) is a one and a low voltage (~0v) is a zero.
[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XbRIVWFRIw) explains how those electrical signals are used to add numbers.
Well you seem to understand that it becomes binary, so I suppose you want to know how they turn parts and electricity into those 0 and 1s.
This gets complicated and my knowledge is a bit rusty, but I’ll do my best.
The basics are that computer components, like a cpu chip, have many many little gates in them, and they can be in two states. Sending a current to a gate flips it from one state to another, which is used to create a consistent logic by basically creating strings of logic that can be interpreted to have meaning by using programming to turn it into bits of information that can be worked with by software.
I hope someone else can come up with a more natural explanation, but basically using electricity to modify logical sequences can be used to store information.
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Is think about a light bulb. It is either own or it is off. This is the relevant piece of information about the light bulb that changes quickly between one state or the other. And if you knew Morse code, you could send information to another person using your light just by switching it on and off.
Computer memory is made up of a ridiculously large number of switches that work exactly the same way a light bulb does. These switches are in one state or the other state, and they can constantly switch between the 2 very quickly and easily.
OK so you start with electricity and it goes into your magic computer box. The electricity goes into a power supply unit (PSU) which controls the distribution to the other bits inside. One of the bits is the Core Processing Unit (CPU) which does the stuff you’re asking.
A key thing that the CPU does is control the voltage of electricity through many, many tiny circuits. If it has high voltage, you could say it’s “on” or a “1”. Low voltage means it’s “off” or a “0”.
By combining these currents and circuits, you can create “logic gates”. This is a tricky part of the puzzle, but fortunately for us, some brainiacs already figured it out. These gates take two inputs (which are two currents of electricity).
A simplish example logic gate would be “AND”, as in, if current X AND current Y are both 1 (high voltage), then let the electricity continue at high voltage too, otherwise make it low voltage.
So two inputs go into the gate and one comes out. For AND, both inputs need to be 1 for the output to be 1. If not, the output is 0.
Combining complicated logic gates and then chaining literally millions/billions of them together is what your CPU is. Electricity travels almost at the speed of light so it’s ridiculously fast to run it through even this many logic gates.
The mind blowing thing is it would be really difficult to use the above information to create like, a calculator right? I wouldn’t want to try that myself! But today, the 1s and 0s are abstracted all the way up to things like real time 3D graphics rendering in video games which is just… truly amazing. I believe that improvements to CPUs and graphics cards is made mostly by being able to add more logic gates to the same tiny size of a CPU, so that it can do more complicated logic faster.
Just like you might tell someone “blink once for yes, twice for no”, it’s a predetermined code that both the sender and the receiver know how to interpret. Instead of blinks it’s whether a voltage is present or not present in a circuit (as in the circuit is on or off.)
One predetermined code that a sender and receiver might use to communicate is ASCII, which uses eight ons/offs in a row to represent a symbol in the English alphabet. So “off, on, off, off, off, off, off, on” means the capital letter “A”. For brevity, let’s use 0 to mean “off” and 1 to mean “on”, and call each 0 or 1 a “bit” of information. “A” is 01000001, and “B” is 01000010, and there’s a pattern for each symbol you want to send.
Another predetermined code might represent pixels in an image, and would be something like “the first eight bits are how red the pixel is, the next eight are how blue it is, and the third eight are how green it is.” Yet another code could represent a sound wave and might be “the next sixteen bits are the amplitude (power) of this wave at this one very tiny slice of time. “The sixteen bits after are the next super tiny slice of time”, and so on.
Literally any information can be _encoded_ into patterns of bits, and _decoded_ by the receiver of the communication, given that the sender and receiver both know which set of rules are being applied to the bits being transferred.
In short… Transistors. Hundreds of billions of them, operating at billions of cycles per second. In other words, extremely fast. Each transistor is either a 1 or 0. The CPU denotes this by using an electrical current to indicate on and no current to indicate off.
Put all those 0’s and 1’s together to form letters, numbers, color pixels, emojis, and so on. Your monitor just interprets them and displays the pixels in the correct locations.
At the lowest level, computers are made up of transistors, which are basically switches that can be switched on or off. When they get switched on, voltage passes through, and the output of the switch becomes ‘high voltage’ or a ‘1’. When they’re off, no voltage passes through, and the output of the switch is ‘low voltage’ or a ‘0’. The key thing to remember here is that unlike a light switch which needs to be physically turned on or off, transistors are turned on or off by voltage.
At the next higher level up, you have logic gates which are transistors hooked up together such that the output from one transistors turns another transistor on or off. Depending on what 1’s and 0’s you input, you will get 1’s and 0’s at the output according to some logic. For example, for a multi-input AND gate, you input a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, and the output will be a ‘1’ if all of the inputs are all 1’s and a ‘0’ otherwise.
At the next higher level up, you have a switch that controls which logic gate gets used and which 1’s and 0’s to feed into its input. So for example, you want to use your multi-input AND gate from the previous level to check 5 different inputs to see if they’re all 1’s. So this switch would turn on the power to your multi-input AND gate, turn off the power to all the other logic gates, and turn on the switches to the data pathways to allow the 5 different inputs to reach your multi-input AND gate. For example, if your 5 different inputs that you’re checking are in address #’s 3, 12, 19, 22, and 27, then the switch will turn on the access switches to those 5 addresses and turn off the access switches to all the other addresses.
So how does this become useable information? Well, the designer of the computer will include a table that tells users what pattern of 1’s and 0’s they should send to this switch in order to do different things, and what the resulting output means in human terms. This is called an Instruction Set Architecture. So for this example, it would tell you which pattern of 1’s and 0’s to send to the switch to turn the multi-input AND gate on and everything else off, and which pattern of 1’s and 0’s to send to make sure it pulls the inputs from the addresses that you want.
Software programmers will write software that does this for you, and also convert the output into a form that you can understand (for example a number on a screen or something). The screen works in a similar manner – the designer of the screen will have a table that tells users what pattern of 1’s and 0’s to send to the screen in order to turn on different pixels, and these pixels create an image on the screen.
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