I’ve always been very mechanically minded, although when it comes to electronics and circuits, I’m baffled.
How can pieces of silicon and metal make my computer turn on, to being able to run games and programmes?
In: Technology
Basically, a transistor is like a pipe with a valve. there is an input, an output, and then the valve that allows water to flow, or not. As SaiphSDC says, electrical fields are a force that causes electrons to move.
The flow of electricity is essentially atoms passing a spare electron to its neighbor in the same direction, due to this force. Good conductors, such as copper, are very good at allowing this flow. So metal wires are used to create paths for the electrical current to flow. Basically a garden hose.
What is so special about a semiconductor is that it can either conduct, or not, based on a third input. Like a water valve in line with your hose or piping. If you apply an electrical field to the ‘valve’, then it changes the property of the silicon and now the current will flow across it.
Finally, we have two types transistors. One that allows flow by default, and one that is closed by default. If you are clever with how you hook up the valve inputs in series or in parallel, you get these fundamental digital logic blocks that nokvok describes.
From there it’s hard to ELI5. These foundational building blocks allow you to create processing units that will do math for you, or storage elements so that you can write in the data you want to operate on, or read back the results.
The BIOS is special circuitry that controls how the motherboard and everything plugged into it power up, what order they are initialized and the system self-learns all the hardware addresses that the various components and peripherals ‘reside’ at. The BIOS is hardcoded – meaning if you turn power off, it remembers the basic instructions and some of the data it’s learned about. It will run some self tests to look for errors. It will configure clock speeds and timings for various components.
From there, when it’s ready, it looks to the hard drives for boot instructions from the Operating System(s). Once it finds those, the OS software takes over and… well I’m not a computer engineer, so I would butcher explanations from this point on 🙂
But it pretty much comes down to (carefully timed) voltage pulses flying around on wires and flipping billions of switches on or off.
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