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I found this while searching for any kind of material that could help me understand how computers work, in the sense of how the flow of electrons becomes stuff

I found this while searching for any kind of material that could help me understand how computers work, in the sense of how the flow of electrons becomes stuff on my screen. It's a question that neither my academic nor my personal studies have answered so any suggestions on what to read/watch/study would be more than appreciated!

0xcde4c3db 11y ago
It really depends on how deep you want to go. This is a topic that requires tunneling through surprisingly few layers before you hit quantum mechanics. I haven't gone through it, but "From NAND to Tetris" [0] is often recommended these days. My own education in these topics was a lot less organized and took quite a few years to really click. Thinking about "the flow of electrons" is more of an analog topic, and that class of behavior is usually treated as non-ideal inefficiency for purposes of digital logic systems. This stuff is extremely important in figuring out how fast you can make things go when designing a real chip/board, but the gory details are fairly unimportant to computer architecture concepts beyond accepting the more abstract models of gate delay (each gate a signal passes through delays it) [1] and fanout (the more inputs you drive with a given output, the slower those inputs are switched) [2]. [0]: http://nand2tetris.org/course.php http://nand2tetris.org/course.php [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_delay#Electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_delay#Electronics [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan-out
- sebkomianos 11y ago
  I wouldn't call my "education" on the topic organized either - I wouldn't call it education anyway, to be honest. "From NAND to Tetris" sounded like what I wanted but once I skimmed through the material it looks like it not as abstract-less as I want to go. Thanks for the reply anyway!

0xcde4c3db 11y ago

It really depends on how deep you want to go. This is a topic that requires tunneling through surprisingly few layers before you hit quantum mechanics. I haven't gone through it, but "From NAND to Tetris" [0] is often recommended these days. My own education in these topics was a lot less organized and took quite a few years to really click. Thinking about "the flow of electrons" is more of an analog topic, and that class of behavior is usually treated as non-ideal inefficiency for purposes of digital logic systems. This stuff is extremely important in figuring out how fast you can make things go when designing a real chip/board, but the gory details are fairly unimportant to computer architecture concepts beyond accepting the more abstract models of gate delay (each gate a signal passes through delays it) [1] and fanout (the more inputs you drive with a given output, the slower those inputs are switched) [2]. [0]: http://nand2tetris.org/course.php http://nand2tetris.org/course.php [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_delay#Electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_delay#Electronics [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan-out

sebkomianos 11y ago
I wouldn't call my "education" on the topic organized either - I wouldn't call it education anyway, to be honest. "From NAND to Tetris" sounded like what I wanted but once I skimmed through the material it looks like it not as abstract-less as I want to go. Thanks for the reply anyway!