What makes computer code ‘work’

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By this I mean, when you write code, what exactly gives that the power to do anything is it more code? 0’s and 1’s? more so, what gives that thing the power to do anything? At some stage I can only deduce what must just be magic making it work because it’ll boil down to something metal and plastic ‘talking to’ an electric current, which doesn’t make sense at all

In: Engineering

17 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are three separate things:

* code
* inputs
* outputs

The outputs are the “power to do anything”. The outputs could be many things, like printing or drawing on a display, writing a hard drive, writing a data link (ethernet), controlling solid state relays, driving analog outputs, etc.

The way the outputs are implemented is as varied as the outputs themselves. A basic discrete output is a pin on the processor that can be written to be a high voltage or low voltage.

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