How computers really work never clicked until I took a computer architecture class where we started in a logic simulator with individual gates, and progressed s

How computers really work never clicked until I took a computer architecture class where we started in a logic simulator with individual gates, and progressed step by step until we had an 8-bit computer, running in the simulator, that could load in machine code generated by an assembler we wrote for that simulated computer, or compiled from a cut-down dialect of C. That was a long semester.