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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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.
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