It’s fascinating to me how people work with black box concepts.
I’ve worked with computers and servers. My passion IS computers and I’m making a living out of it. And still would work with them without having a good understanding on how they work.
I should’ve gone to the proper school, I guess.
During the winter holidays I finally understood how a CPU works. I absorbed the full and incredibly amazing ‘Design a CPU’ course created by Ross Mcgowan. That, in turn is based on the great ‘But How Do It Know’ written by J Clark Scott.
You start from simple concepts and progress to a fully working CPU:
- logic gates
- bits of memory
- bytes of memory
- memory registers
- 256 bytes of RAM
- send data over a bus
- do math ops with an ALU
- design a complete Control Unit
You get it all: an instruction set, an assembler and everything an educational tool needs.
I have not become a master but the fog is gone and it feels amazing. Of course, this was just another step along the way. There’s still this concept on how a NAND gate works, down to the transistor level which will remain a black box for me, for a while.
Next up: mastering Rust. That black box isn’t going to open itself.
I’ll be sharing these journeys as I go. Follow along if you want to see what happens when curiosity meets impostor syndrome.