I still wonder how people manage to create a machine that visualize a graphic to a screen then commands it with a button.
I still wonder how “programming” works through metal/gold/copper
I’m still amaze that people made these stuff
In: Technology
This is a complicated question, pretty much impossible to perfectly ELI5 (note that the other answers are all fairly complicated). There’s a reason you can an entire degree in, essentially, the answer to this question. Other people are already covering the fundamentals of 0s and 1s, so I’m going to try and answer the question from a slightly different angle. What everyone else said is 100% true, this is simply framing the answer on the level of the operating system (ie Windows, Mac) rather than on the level that your processor is aware of.
Hardware and software communicate via things called drivers. When you plug in a keyboard or a mouse (and I believe monitors as well, I am less certain about them however) your computer doesn’t really know that that’s what they are – it actually sees them as files like a text file. When your computer wants to communicate with an external piece of hardware it writes to that file, then the driver reads that file and sends the information over to the hardware. When you move your mouse, the mouse writes to the file and then the driver picks it up, decodes it, and sends that info over to your computer’s internals. You might think that sounds a bit roundabout, but it’s useful because your computer now gets to think about any piece of hardware the same – mouse, keyboard, video camera, whatever it is, it’s all just a file, and you can leave it to the driver to figure out the nitty gritty details.
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