How do computers know what to do with binary 1’s and 0’s?

Question

I’m very interested in learning how computers work, but can’t seem to find the exact information I’m looking for. My understanding is, and **please** correct me if I’m wrong, is that if you press the letter “A” on a keyboard, a circuit underneath will close which sends electricity to wires, and based on the combination of voltages on the wires, the computer outputs an “A”. But how does the computer know what do to with voltages? What do the voltages represent? At what point does any of this information get converted into binary, and once it does, what happens?

I don’t expect someone to be able to explain this like I’m five. For me, it’s a difficult, but really interesting subject. Any clarification and dumbing down is appreciated! I’m really hoping to get a better grasp on my understanding of all this.

Edit: I should’ve made the title “How do computers work?” Still wondering how computers know what to do with 1’s and 0’s, though.

In: 0

Answer 1

They have what are called logic gates. I’ll pick two of the most common ones AND and OR. Logic gates usually have two inputs and produce an output. You can combine multiple logic gates to form more complex gates. An AND logic gate will output a 1 if both inputs are 1 and will output a zero otherwise. An OR logic gate will output a 1 if any of the inputs are 1. Now these zeros and 1s on the hardware level can be thought of as electric currents A zero is a low voltage signal and a 1 is a high voltage signal. To show a letter on the screen, the computer is simply outputting the results of various computations done on the logic gates. So if an OR gate gets a low voltage signal as one input and a high voltage signal as another input it will output a high voltage signal . This high voltage signal can be fed as input to another logic gate and the other input comes from the output of one or more logic gates. The result to an end user will be the letter you pressed appearing on your screen which is the output of multiple logic gates, a combination of low and high voltage signals. An operation as simple as addition can involve as many as five logic gates. Not sure if this was easy to follow. Computer architecture was not my fave class in college lol