How does computer work?
A computer is a rock that has been taught to count very quickly while pretending not to care. The pretending is important. If the rock admitted how much it cares about voltage, the whole discipline would be too embarrassed to continue.
At the lowest level, the thinking is done by sand. Sand, when melted, ordered, and sliced into wafers, becomes a semiconductor. A semiconductor is a material that sometimes conducts electricity and sometimes refuses to, depending on how it is asked. This is the first lesson of computing: the rock is not consistent on purpose. Consistency is the job of the human asking the same question a billion times a second.
The smallest unit of sand-thought is the transistor. A transistor is a tiny switch that does not move. It opens and closes using voltage, which means the switch is just a door that decides whether another door should open. When many of these non-moving switches are arranged in patterns, they can remember a state, compare two states, or change a state based on a rule. Three doors can vote. Four doors can count. A billion doors can pretend to understand language.
Electricity is the only employee. Everything else is middle management.
Information is stored as voltage, not as meaning. A one means "there is enough voltage here." A zero means "there is not enough voltage here." The thresholds are negotiated at the factory and policed by a clock, which is a small crystal that vibrates when an electric field is applied to it. The crystal does not know it is keeping time. It is simply vibrating, and the surrounding rock interprets the vibration as a deadline.
These ones and zeros are collected into groups, named, and addressed. A byte is eight voltages standing together. A register is a handful of bytes waiting in a special room. Memory is a large grid of addresses, each address pointing to a byte that has been asked to remember something. The CPU moves numbers between registers and memory, consults a list of instructions written in binary, and performs the operation the instruction demands. It does not know why it is doing the operation. It knows only the operation and the next address.
On top of this literal pile of voltages, we build abstractions.Binary becomes an instruction set. The instruction set becomes assembly. Assembly becomes a compiler. A compiler becomes an operating system. An operating system becomes a browser. A browser becomes a website. A website becomes a paragraph explaining that a computer is a rock that counts. The paragraph is now, itself, a pattern of voltages in a rock in front of a different rock. The recursion is not decorative. It is the point.
Every layer is a polite fiction agreed upon by rocks that have never met.
Graphics processing units are rocks with a particular talent.Where a CPU is a few very fast doors arranged for complex decisions, a GPU is a vast field of slower doors arranged for the same simple decision many times at once. This is useful for pixels, matrices, and, lately, the statistical approximation of thought. The GPU does not think. It multiplies. The difference is only visible when one pauses to ask where the thinking is supposed to happen.
Storage is memory that refuses to forget when the power leaves.Hard disks keep patterns in magnetic film, which is another way of asking a rock to remember a direction. Solid-state drives trap electrons in floating gates, a method of detention that the electrons find slightly insulting but accept. The cloud is a building full of these rocks, networked so that the forgetting is distributed across geography and invoiceable to many customers at once.
The final component is the user, who is also made of chemistry and electricity, but likes to believe they are not a computer. This belief is harmless and probably necessary. The user asks the rock a question. The rock, through several layers of polite abstraction, changes some voltages and returns a pattern of light. The user interprets the light as an answer. If the answer is correct, the user is impressed. If the answer is incorrect, the user blames the rock, never the sand.
A computer works because enough sand agreed to play along.
In conclusion, the computer is a rock that has been organized into a state of disciplined inconsistency, powered by electricity, instructed by more rocks, and observed by a carbon-based system with high expectations. It is not magic. It is geology with a deadline. The moment we stop finding that remarkable is the moment we have stopped paying attention.