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
You ever see one of those rube-goldberg machines? This hits that, which hits that, which hits that… on and on?
Computers are like that.
When you switch the computer on, a supremely complex process occurs–but it’s all down to electricity in wires. The electricity is always flowing from the start, and the programs are ultimately just ways of supplying inputs to complex electrical circuits.
One of the first thing a computer does when you start it is try to look for the boot device. It does this because there is a specific chip on the computer’s hardware that does exactly one thing: when electricity is poured into its input side, it outputs the address of the first instruction in the boot sequence. From there, the cascade begins; the electricity flows to the next part of the sequence, which copies the data in that location to a specific register in the CPU. This is all implemented via hardware circuits: it’s very like a rube-goldberg machine; electricity in this side causes this effect on the other side through a series of pre-designed circuits.
From there, the first instruction has been loaded. Other hardware takes over, and the complex process of computation begins. Each instruction in the CPU’s instruction set is ultimately implemented in the hardware as either a series of circuits or a series of other instructions which themselves are implemented as circuits. The CPU constantly reads the instruction register (this action itself is hardware-based) and copies whatever value happens to be in there as inputs to another circuit; this circuit’s designed to kick off the chain reaction of whichever specific instruction is coded for, because it has a specific circuit pathway associated with each potential input value.
That’s computation in an nutshell. Somewhere, there’s a circuit that takes as input a series of electrical signals on a series of wires; by its very nature it does nothing except pass those or other signals on to whichever circuit pathway is specified by the original input. Over and over and over and over again this happens, as long as there’s electricity supplied to the CPU at all from the power supply. Everything else a computer can do is just a series of hardware circuits that correspond to logical instructions.
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