They didn’t start it with rocks. The first calculators used gears. Those were hard to reprogram. So they started using relais. That worked but was very slow. Then they found out that lamps (vacuum tubes) could take the place of relais but these wore down too fast. Then someone figured out that rock stuff (silicium) could do the same as a vacuum tube. After that it became a race to make them as small as possible to cram more of them together.
I took a course in computing systems engineering which was basically going all the way from semiconductors up to operating systems and it was incredibly interesting.
One of the things that surprised me was how easy it was to abstract away the lower-level complexity as soon as you got one step up. It’s kind of like recursive Lego pieces, you only have to design one piece then you can use a bunch of those to design another piece, then use a bunch of those to design another, and so on. By the end you have several orders of magnitude of the fundamental pieces but you don’t really think about them anymore.
The thing about real world processor design though is that all those abstractions are leaky.
At higher levels of design you end up having to consider things like the electrical behavior of transistors, thermal density, the molecular dynamics of strained silicon crystals (and how they behave under thermal cycling), antenna theory, and the limits and quirks of the photolithography process you’re using (which is a whole other can of worms with a million things to consider).
Not everyone needs to know everything about every part of the process (that’s impossible), but when you’re pushing the limits of high performance chips each layer of the design is entangled enough with the others to make everyone’s job really complicated.
EDIT: Some interesting links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U885cIhOXBM
Dude doesn’t even know about the magic smoke.
https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic-smoke.html
I wonder whether ESR will one day up his SSL game.
Generally it’s only the wizards that deal with the physical side - such as rock shapping and rock combining - that get magic smoke, though if they did their part wrong the wizards that make rocks think might get it as can the people playing Skyrim using the thinking rocks.
How do they get the smoke to go in? Once I let the magic smoke out I am never quite able to put it back in properly.
When I learned about how they are making the new CPUs it blew my mind. Dropping a microscopic droplet of metal and blasting it with lasers to a stencil like thingy to create the nanometer circuitry. I was like how the fuck did you even thought about doing that?.. Technologies like these are really marvelous.
You start with macroscopic photolithography, add material science of semiconductors and then iterate a million times. It didn’t start at nanoscale.
Give me a break… I’m still trying to wrap my head around how transistors work. For a layman this is like magic.
Exactly, and “we need this as small and precise as possible” means “can lasers do it?” As an engineer I default to fast and precise means computer guided laser if possible
I’m still stuck on how you get from “switch go on, switch go off” to, well, anything
One Switch can have two states. Switch on is a 1 and switch off is a 0. Group 8 switches together and you get a byte. Miniaturize the switches and put 8 trillion of them into the size of a fingernail, and ta-da you have a 1TB micro SD card.
Wire up two switches so that a light bulb only will go on when both switches are on (1). This wiring creates an AND gate. Adjusting the wiring so that if either of the switches are on, the light turns on. This wiring is an OR gate.
Channing the output of the lightbulb and treating it like a new switch allows you to combine enough AND and OR gates to make other logic blocks, NOT, NAND, XOR, etc.
Combine enough logic blocks and you can wire up a circuit so that you can add the value of two switches together, and now you can start to perform addition.
This all naturally evolves to the point where you can play Skyrim with the most degenerate porn mods.
I like your explanation, but i dont understand it. Keep up the good work.
In addition to Turing Complete, which is really good, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is a fantastic book that literally goes from two kids trying to talk to each other at night with flashlights, to a fully working Z80 clone, while not being hard to understand and using a really good conversational teaching method. It’s how I figured out a lot about CPU design, microarchitectures, assembly and machine langauge and a lot of other things.
Simply put, the switching doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s the meaning we assign to the arrangement of on-off switches. Much like flag signals, the flags don’t do anything besides be visible and locatable. Yet, we can establish a communication protocol with flags, lights, fingers on a hand, etc. this signaling is done electronically with many layers of meaning and complexity, and nowadays at unfathomable scale and speed.
Watch this. It’s a guy who shows how computers work using dominoes. It really helps explain how calculating something works at its most fundamental level
Well… since you put it that way, it is quite staggeringly improbable, isn’t it?
“Through these terse, inter-connected runes, an invisible magic flows. You cannot change the rune, as then the spell will be broken.”
“Where does the magic come from, mommy?”
“From the highest point in the invisible topology of this magic, Billy: the Hoover Dam/Niagara Falls”.