What's Inside Your Device : Introduction to computing #TechTuesday

Greeting everyone and welcome to the first installment in our multi-episode series, Tech Tuesdays. This is a series aimed at explaining the basic functioning of the devices we use everyday. You will be baffled once you understand the understanding of something so ubiquitous yet revolutionary. Read on as we unravel the secrets of the wheels the drives the 21st century and it's people.  

Hi, it's me Vertika. I am back with yet another article, one of a long series that too. Being a tech enthusiast I was initially drawn towards talking about the new gadgets and wonders. But it dawned on me that almost all of us talk endlessly about gadgets without even understanding what makes them work.

What is a Snapdragon 835 chip?

Snapdragon 835 and its components

What does it mean when we say that the new iPhone comes with 4 GB of RAM?

How do we attain such high speeds on super computers?

Well calm down, we will answer all that.

Now if you have come this far and not just clicked the back button on reading that this article is about computers, welcome and now I hereby assume the responsibility of making you aware of the beautiful genius thing on which you are reading this article.


Thus without any ado, lets get right into it.


So our lovely world as we know it is made up of, well atoms.

Atoms made up of electrons, neutrons and protons which are further made up of quarks & leptons and unless you are a particle physicist (which you are not) you don't need to look further than this.

But what I and I believe you too do know is that we get our electricity or current  from flow of electron through a conducting medium i.e.- Wires made of copper and aluminum, etc.

Over-excitement leads to disaster

Now for our classical computers, don’t worry im not talking about some ancient devices which were used in some ancient era but also about the computer that you are using right now, we have two states of current a.k.a current on and current off.

It is like a switch really, it is either off or on.



Now if you've ever seen a movie scene where some hacker is at work you must have seen strings of zeros and ones like this-

 Zeros and Ones. This isn't how hacking is done btw.

And these zeros and ones are what make your computer.

Everything, ever, is a zero and a one.

Which again is just current off and current on aka electrons flowing or not flowing.

Now I call that cool. If you are not convinced by now, consider this alright.

Every game you play, every picture you save, every text you send, not to include all of those calculations you make to get your homework done quicker

All of it, and I remind you, all of it. Even sending the rover to mars. Is nothing but electrons flowing or not flowing, the state being true or false, the switch being on or off, the input registering as 0 or 1.

By now I am sure that you are asking yourself- " Okay we get it, it's true or false, 0 or 1 , on or off. But how in the heaven's name does this happen?"

Well we have a nifty little invention called Transistor.

The three footed things are called transistors 

Now these transistors can be arranged in some wicked ways to give us logic gates which is perhaps to computing what bricks are the construction.

Don't get scared! Logic Gates are really simple. Let me walk you through the basic ones (And, Or, Nor)-

Let us first understand why they are called gates.

Well because the first and foremost thing they do is allow or inhibit the entry and exit of electrons. Just like a door does.

The names i.e.- AND, OR and NOT are very intuitive when it comes to their function.

1. AND Gate- AND gate is set to 1 only and only if both inputs to the gate are true.

Simply, if the current flows from both ends and completes a circuit, and gate will say that its true.

2.NOT Gate- NOT gate however is kind of the naughty one who will say false if you give a truth and truth if you give it false.

3.OR Gate- OR Gate is the sloth among them all. It cant be bothered and will give you a true
anyways even if one value is true.

All these outputs are represented in truth tables. For the above mentioned gates we obtain this truth table.

NAND and NOR gate will be covered in later posts, don't worry about it. 

And there you have it, these are the three fundamental gates that help you in manipulating subatomic particles to go ahead and work the way we want them to!

From these logic gates it is that we get computers’ memory, that we get them to add, subtract, write speeches, play games, design the BFR, and what not.

I want you all to take a second and breathe in this moment.

Electrons are much much smaller than these

You just got to learn how something as smaller than an single atom.

The SpaceX BFR (Big Flipping Rocket) that's what it is.

Can control something like this-








Something stuff as simple as that makes something as almost magical as a computer work.

As we delve deeper and further on other Tech Tuesday articles, you will get to know more about computers and, which to me, seem almost like a world in itself!

Till then,

Peace

☮️

Written by Vertika for Hexarius©️

If you did like this article, don't forget to check out the books we recommend to understand it better. 

1- How computers work-  https://amzn.to/2w0TkbQ

2- Fundamentals of computer - https://amzn.to/2Pq4XRv

3- Cambridge Intl. AS and A level CS course-book (heavily recommended)- https://amzn.to/2vZyWrp  

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