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
Well a circuit mostly is a conducting line connecting the power supply to whatever is put in as the consumer. But that is boring. It is better to also put in a switch. That switch basically interrupts the conducting line, unless it is closed.
It gets really interesting when you have a switch that does not work by flipping a lever, but a switch that works by electricity (that is where the silicon comes into play, since it has some special properties). Those interupt the conducting line unless a current is fed into the side of the switch. And now you can build a circuit that switches the switch… or only switches the switch if two other switches are switched and so on. So that is basically playing very complex domino…. unless you notice that with two switches that switch each other, you can build a memory retaining thingy.
With two electronic switches you can build a flip flop. A thing that keeps a circuit open once it is opened and closed once it is closed. It is a way to conserve information.
If you put many a flip flops into a row, you got a register. Those flip flops flipping each other makes that register able to count… and do math. It is all really faszinating. You build a few circuits that add or subtract two registers when you flip a switch, and you basically have a calculator. From a calculator to a computer it is only a matter of upscaling. Your keyboard and mouse are the switches you flip and the cpu and graphics card do the calculating, shoveling data from one register (of which a computer has billions) to another.
That’s basically it. Everything else is software (in many different abstraction layers).
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