not sure if you're trying to be facetious, but no, the answer is not obvious: it could have been the case that the creators of C decided to make it a faithful,

not sure if you're trying to be facetious, but no, the answer is not obvious: it could have been the case that the creators of C decided to make it a faithful, thin abstraction aover the hardware of the computers they were using. In that case, learning how C works would tell you a lot about how that specific computer worked. One point made in the article is that a) C wasn't really developed that way, and b) computers have changed considerably since then, so even the above was true, it no longer is true now.