I’m not very technical so apologies if I use terms interchangeably that don’t make sense but I will try to explain. What I understand and put very basic is: we write code, it then gets “converted” so that the computer understands it. This is represented by 1’s and 0’s that trigger current in the hardware that gets stored in memory, lights a LED, etc. through (I think it’s called) logic gates.
That’s my way of understanding it. What I don’t understand is how the current is triggered? What causes that interaction?
For example, when I click save in a document. How does that trigger it to be saved in the hardware. Is it that, when I physically click on my mouse. That physical interaction of clicking sends a current and the computer recognises that the proportion of the pixels on the screen represents saving the document, which then triggers it to send that current to the logic gates?
Edit: Thank you for all your answers.
In: Technology
There’s actually a lot that goes on when you click your mouse. But at its simplest, you’ve closed a switch that tells a transistor to turn on (or off). That sends signals to other transistors that do other things, and they send signals to other transistors, etc. etc.
Eventually that causes a change in a memory location. That can be transistor-based memory (SSD, USB thumb drive, DRAM, SRAM) or it can be a change in magnetism on the surface of an HDD.
That memory location can encode a 0 or a 1, but it can “mean” a whole bunch of different things depending on the context in which it is later used (read out). You might have changed a letter in a Word document. You might have changed an instruction in a program you are writing that will later be used to tell the computer what to do (after being read by a transistor and sent on to other transistors etc. etc.). You might have changed a color in an image. Depends on the context.
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