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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Replying to
@Foone
like last night when I explained how the Antikythera mechanism isn't the kind of computer that can run Doom:
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
BTW people joke about running Doom on the Antikythera mechanism but it's an analog computer. Analog computers are a type of calculator, and generally are not Turing complete. So they can't run Doom.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
anyway it's a subject I've been thinking about for like... a decade and a half now. I had to take a whole computer science degree to grasp the form of it, but it seems like it's something you could explain a lot more simply by not going into all the details
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
and specifically that's the whole end-to-end process. How do you take some sand and at the end of it, have the computer you're playing Doom on?
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
because a lot of the steps are easy enough to understand on their own, but that doesn't help with the whole process. You might understand how a computer program can turn into Doom, or how some transistors can be logic gates, but... how does it all work together?
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
a transistor is just a switch! it turns on or off a current based on another current. Does that mean if you got enough lightswitches together, it becomes Doom?
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
anyway maybe I'll write a book or I'll write 17 long twitter threads or I'll write 17 long twitter threads and then put them in a book
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Replying to
@Foone
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. (this one was already on my to-read list!)
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Noam Nisan & Shimon Schocken
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
so definitely some books to check out first before I really consider writing this, since they may already do what I'm considering, or have ideas that'd push me in a different direction.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
oh wait, "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles "is also nand2tetris! so that's one book/site, not two.
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Christopher Drum
@christopherdrum
Replying to
@Foone
I did Part 1 of the video course with the book and enjoyed it immensely. It clarified a lot of things I only half-understood about how CPUs are structured and do their work. It didn't make me an expert (that would require years of study), but it did make me "less of a dummy."