Where does it begin?

[crampp]

Could anyone tell me how the peices of metal and plastic that make up a PC become programmable. I.E. when does a piece of metal know programming language.

Thanks

Crampy

 

[edfair]

When the little roads engraved on a chip of silicon lead to the little houses engraved on the same chip. Metal is programable once, but it doesn't know machine language. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[crampp]

If you have time, could you explain the process from metal to computer chip or advise a point of reference.

Thanks!

 

[edfair]

Will have to think about the resource to point you to but the evolution is pretty much as follows:
1) Mechanical fire control devices for military
2) Hand calculation of trajectory
3) Mechanical calculators
4) Electromechanical calculators, relays, then use of tubes as switching devices
5) Invention of transistor
6) Transistorised calculators
7) Small scale integration of transistorized devices
8) Development of SSI calculator
9) Medium scale integration
10) 4 BIT programable controller
11) 8 bit programable controller
12) Large scale integration
13) 8 bit programable processor which led to the Altair
14) More and more circuitry on single chip Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[swayda]

Um, that's a pretty big chunk, but I think I know what you are asking. Chips are not made from metal, they're made of slices of silicon. Each slice has micro circuits burned into it by acid. The slices are then layered together into integrated circuits. In the early days of computers these chips were not programmable, they were real ROM chips. Later, with the next generation, the chips became programmable electronically, or EPROM chips. When you enter the CMOS setup of the BIOS you can make certain choices. These will be maintained in the eprom as long as there is a small electrical charge applied. This in itself is not a "programming language". In human terms those chips are like your brain stem. They control communications to the devices attached to your computer, like your involuntary nervous system. The higher brain is the CPU, the main processing unit in the computer. A computer only understands 1's and 0's. A programming language is like a human language since writing programs in 1's and 0's would be too difficult. A program, once written must be turned into 1's and 0's either by an interpreter of compiler written expressly for the cpu being used. Today programs are stored on a storage device, like a disk. When an execute command is received by the operating system it interrupts the cpu. The cpu feeds the program into RAM and begins executing the instructions contained in the program. That's a really "nutshell" explaination. If that's not what you were asking feel free to contact me at
swayser@optonline.net Don Swayser

 

[crampp]

Excellent.

Thanks Don.

Ever thought of becoming a teacher?

Crampy