What does a circuit (in a computer) do and how does it do it?
In: Technology
A circuit is just a flow that allows electricity to travel.
If you took a battery and put a wire that connects both terminals, that is a circuit. But it’s not a very good circuit, since it isn’t doing anything.
If you add something inline, like an LED, now you have a circuit that powers the LED. It’s a bit more useful, but ultimately it only does one thing.
If you add a lightswitch, you now have the ability to easily break the circuit by flipping the lightswitch. This is getting a bit more useful.
In a computer, there are things called transistors. These are essentially electrically controlled lightswitches. You can make a transistor complete a circuit by applying power to it. You can then feed this electricity into the control of another transistor (or multiple transistors). This is what makes a computer so powerful — the use of transistors opens and closes circuits, which open and close others, and so on, and so on. Do this a few billion times in the right combinations, and you get something that starts to look like a computer.
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