I took a course in computing systems engineering which was basically going all the way from semiconductors up to operating systems and it was incredibly interesting.

One of the things that surprised me was how easy it was to abstract away the lower-level complexity as soon as you got one step up. It's kind of like recursive Lego pieces, you only have to design one piece then you can use a bunch of those to design another piece, then use a bunch of those to design another, and so on. By the end you have several orders of magnitude of the fundamental pieces but you don't really think about them anymore.

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic-smoke.html

I wonder whether ESR will one day up his SSL game.

Anon also forgot to infuse the lightning pixies after inscribing the runes, tsk tsk.

They're the ones who let the smoke out if you anger them!

Generally it's only the wizards that deal with the physical side - such as rock shapping and rock combining - that get magic smoke, though if they did their part wrong the wizards that make rocks think might get it as can the people playing Skyrim using the thinking rocks.

You start with macroscopic photolithography, add material science of semiconductors and then iterate a million times. It didn't start at nanoscale.

One Switch can have two states. Switch on is a 1 and switch off is a 0. Group 8 switches together and you get a byte. Miniaturize the switches and put 8 trillion of them into the size of a fingernail, and ta-da you have a 1TB micro SD card.

Wire up two switches so that a light bulb only will go on when both switches are on (1). This wiring creates an AND gate. Adjusting the wiring so that if either of the switches are on, the light turns on. This wiring is an OR gate.

Channing the output of the lightbulb and treating it like a new switch allows you to combine enough AND and OR gates to make other logic blocks, NOT, NAND, XOR, etc.

Combine enough logic blocks and you can wire up a circuit so that you can add the value of two switches together, and now you can start to perform addition.

This all naturally evolves to the point where you can play Skyrim with the most degenerate porn mods.

Simply put, the switching doesn't do anything by itself. It's the meaning we assign to the arrangement of on-off switches. Much like flag signals, the flags don't do anything besides be visible and locatable. Yet, we can establish a communication protocol with flags, lights, fingers on a hand, etc. this signaling is done electronically with many layers of meaning and complexity, and nowadays at unfathomable scale and speed.

Watch this. It's a guy who shows how computers work using dominoes. It really helps explain how calculating something works at its most fundamental level

It's only time until the rock fights back.

Isn't software the "trick rock into thinking" part?

How is software without a CPU useful? Its literally a list of instructions for a CPU.

Also a CPU can still calculate stuff if you just send electrical signals to the right connections. Software is just a way for the CPU to keep going and do more calculations with the results.

The thing is, it never stays in a constant state! It's more like a water dam with a steady water flow that you can open and close. You said you know the typical explanation already, so I won't cry to explain it again.

I'm not sure what the typical explanation is, but a transistor is not a wire.

A wire is a conductor. It conducts electricity from end to the other.

A transistor is a semi-conductor device made from semi-conducting materials, so it conducts electricity between 2 ends with a variable electrical resistance. This variable can be controlled by putting voltage on the third leg. This way a transistor is basically a resistor with a variable resistance, which unlike a resistor is also controllable by a third input.

This ability is a property of the material. It cannot be constructed by a regular wire.

The memory is generally done by something called a capacitor (though there are more techniques) which just can hold a little electrical charge - roughly having an electrical charge means it's a 1, otherwise it's a 0.

Get 8 of those things and you have a byte.

It's generally easier to think of it as water: electrical lines are tubes moving water, capacitors are little containers that can have water (meaning bit = 1) or be empty (bit = 0), transistors are one-way water valves which are controlled by water (imagine they have a pressure button that opens the gate if there is water running in the tube passimg by that button, putting pressure on it).

From this simple basis you can actually create a lot of complexity by having a LOT of these things combined in weird ways.

Further, there's also a lot of complexity due to the Physics of the real world being less than perfect (for example, the "capacitors" leak water, so not only do you have to say that bit=1 is "water above a certain level" rathe than "full" - since as soon as it's filled it starts losing water - but you even have to check them once in a while and top up the ones which are supposed to be full before so kuch water leaks that the level has fallen below that treated as a "1" - this is actually how DRAM memory works, though with electric charge rather than water).

Probably the silicon being made into a wafer.