I just searched online and was taken aback by the lack of content I could find , there are millions of video for different small niche things by hundred of people which are right and wrong about things but the most I could even find about how chips are made today are the ones explaining how silicon works etc. LTT is the only one which even have a factory video and it is too very censored uninformative and useless for my questions .
1 - I get that light is flashed in binary to code chips but how does it actually fookin work ? What is the machine emmiting this light made up of ? How does this flashing light hold as data forever on chip ?
2 - How was program’s, OSs, Kernal etc loaded on CPU in early days when there were no additional computers to feed it those like today ?
3 - I get internet is light storing information but how ? Fookin HOW ?
4 - How did it all come to be like it is today and ist it possible for one human to even learn how it all works or are we just limited one or two things ? Like cab we only know how to program or how to make hardware but not both or all ?
5 - Do we have to join Intel first or something to learn how most of the things work lol ? Cause the info available online about the software, hardware, skills etc is shit ? Not even RISC-V documentary are available .
Context - Just started learning python and got philosophical to how all things came to be ? Is just making apps or websites even a thing worth learning in the grand scheme of things ? I get that some people is just okay with that but come on have you never thought about how the deep you can go ?
anyway feel free to tell me to stfu and I’m sorry if sub=wrong and will move on request . And as the username suggest I’ll be posting questions as I have them and thanks.
ALSO ELI5 everything please
This video by Branch Education (on YouTube or Nebula) is a high level explanation of every step in a semiconductor fab. It doesn’t go over the details of how semiconductor junctions work, though. That sort of device physics is discussed in this YouTube video by Ben Eater, “how semiconductors work”
When the CPU powers up, typically the very first thing it starts to execute is the bootloader. Bootloaders will vary depending on the system, and today’s modern Intel or AMD desktop machines boot very differently to their 1980s predecessor. However, since the IBM PC laid the foundation for how most computers booted up for a nearly four decades, it may be instructive to see how it worked in the 80s. This WikiBook on x86 bootloading should be valid for all 32-bit x86 targets, from the original 8086 to the i686. It may even be valid further, but UEFI started to take off, which changed everything into a more modern form.
But even before the 80s, computers could have a program/kernel/whatever loaded using magnetic tape, punch cards, or even by hand with physical switches, each representing one bit.
But how does the computer decode this binary “machine code” into instructions to perform? See this video by Ben Eater, explaining machine instructions for the MOS 6502 CPU (circa 1975). The age of the CPU is not important, but rather than by the 70s, the basics of CPU operations has already been laid down, and that CPU is easy to explain yet non-trivial.
The mechanics of light bouncing inside a fibre optic cable is well-explained in this YouTube video by engineerguy. But for an explanation of how ones-and-zeros get converted into light to be transmitted, that’s a bit more involved. I might just point you to the Wikipedia page for fibre optic communications.
How the data is encoded is important, as this has significant impact on bandwidth and data integrity, not just for light but for wireless RF transmission and wireline transmission. For wireless, this Branch Education video on Starlink (YouTube or Nebula) is instructive. And for wired, this Computerphile YouTube video on ADSL covers the challenges faced.
Quite frankly, I might just recommend the entirety of the Computerphile channel, particularly their back catalogue when they laid down computer fundamentals.
As of 2024, the field is enormous, to the point that a CompSci degree necessarily has to be focused on a specific concentration. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the hard stuff like things like device physics are off-limits, leaving just stuff like software and AI. Sam Zeloof has been making homemade microchips, devising his own semiconductor process and posting it on YouTube..
Specifically to your question about either software or hardware, the specialty of embedded software engineering requires skills with low-level software or firmware, as well as dealing with substantial hardware-specific details. People that write drivers or libraries for new hardware require skills from both regime, being the bridge between Electrical Engineers that design the hardware, and software developers that utilize the hardware.
Likewise, developers for high performance computers need to know the hardware inside-out, to have any chance of extracting every last bit (pun intended) of speed. However, these developers tend to rely upon documentation such as data sheets, rather than having to be keenly aware of how the hardware was manufactured. Some level of logical abstraction is necessary to tractably understand today’s necessarily large and complex systems.
Nope! Often, you can look to existing references, such as Linux source code, to provide a peek at what complexities exist in today’s machines. I say that, but the Linux kernel is truly a monster, not because it’s badly written, but because they willingly take code to support every single bleeding platform that people are willing to author code for. And that means lots and lots of edge cases; there’s no such thing as a “standard” computer. X86 might be the closest to a “standard” but Intel has never quite been consistent across that architecture’s existence. And ARM and RISC-V are on the rise, in any case.
Perhaps what’s most important is to develop strong foundations to build on. Have a cursory understanding of computing, networking, storage, wireless, software licenses, encryption, video encoding/decoding, UI/UX, graphics, services, containers, data and statistical analysis, and data exchange formats. But then pick one and focus on it, seeing how it interacts with other parts of the computing world.
Growing up, I had an interest in IT and computer maintenance. Then it evolved into writing websites. Then into writing C++ software. Right before university, I started playing around with the Arduino’s Atmel 328p CPU directly, and so I entered as a Computer Engineer, hoping to do both software and hardware.
The space is huge, so start somewhere that interests you. From the examples above, I think online videos are a fantastic resource, but so can blog posts by major companies, as can talks at conferences, as can sitting in at university courses.
Good luck and good studies!