I can tell I’m dumb because of how much effort I’ve put into trying to understand this and I still haven’t gotten it. But for the life of me I can’t grasp how we got from punch cards to machine language to assembler language. It is almost magic.
In: Technology
The transistor. The invention of it is the start of the Tech Age. Everything goes back to it. It made switching possible by electricity alone. They replaced the holes in the punch card.
Why is switching by electricity wanted? That’s because it is not manual (you don’t have to do it by hand or by help of physical machine), and it is scalable (you can make it as big or as small as you want depending on how big or small the currently available materials allow). It’s also fast, because it is not manual and you can take advantage of the nature of electricity.
Your typical light switch in rooms are manual switches for electricity. Your input is either turn it on or off then that information is converted into electrical signal. Another example is the push button where when you press it there’s light; and when you let go, the light turns off.
Keyboards are basically a lot of push button switches.
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