When I was a child watching my dad fix things around the farm. I was amazed at his power to manipulate the physical world; welding, angle grinding, hammering, e

When I was a child watching my dad fix things around the farm. I was amazed at his power to manipulate the physical world; welding, angle grinding, hammering, etc. I was always amazed by the back of the television and asked him "Dad, how does electricity work?". He didn't know. From that moment, I was imbued with purpose. When we got our first computer I sought desperately to know how it worked and how it was built. My first year of computer science at university was uninspiring. I learned to code but I wanted to know how people coded without operating systems, without using a computer. I was annoyed by the chicken and egg nature of it. In my second year we did the "hardware/software" interface and read Patterson and Hennessy's Computer Architecture and Design. When we made our way to the diagram of the basic von Neumann architecture, my childhood questions, that previously no one could answer, was answered. The world made sense. And it was the class your now teaching that finally satisfied my childhood questions.