This book is not primarily intended to be a textbook.

There are no problems to do

at the end of each chapter. Its intention is simply to demystify the subject of
computers for anyone who has ever wondered what's going on inside of that box.
Of course, it also makes a perfect introduction to computers for a young person who
will ultimately go on to get a PhD in Computer Science. But it should be easily
understandable by housewives, senior citizens and children who can read well. It
should be understandable to plumbers and street sweepers. It requires no previous
technical education. It only requires that you can read the language, you can turn
a light bulb on and off, and you can do very simple addition on the order of
8+5=13.

In the computer, the principle on which it operates has to do with electricity, but
that doesn't mean that it is hard to understand. If you have observed the fact that
when you turn on a light switch, a light bulb lights up, and when you turn the
switch off, the light goes dark, then you have observed the principle on which
computers operate. That is about all you need to know about electricity to
understand computers.

They appear to be doing complex things, only because they do a huge number of
simple things one after another in a small amount of time. The result, as in a
video game, is very complex in appearance, but in reality, is very simple, just
very very fast.

Computers are designed to do a small number of specific simple things, and to do

these things quickly, one after the other. Which simple things are done, and in
what order, determines what sort of task the computer accomplishes in any given
time, but anything the computer does consists of nothing outside of its limited
capabilities.

So the secret of computers is not that they are complex, rather it is their speed.
Let's look at exactly how fast their speed is.
Since computers work on electricity, their speed is related to the speed of
electricity. You may remember hearing that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per
second. That's pretty darned fast. Light can go around the entire earth seven times
in one second,
when traveling in a wire, gets slowed down to about half the speed of light. But
still, going all the way around the Earth three and a half times in one second is
extremely fast.

all of this time that computers have been getting faster, smaller and cheaper, the
things that computers do, really have not changed since they were first invented in
the 1940's. They still do the same few simple things, just faster.
A bit is some kind of a physical object that has a size and a location in space,
and it has some quality about itself, that at any given time can be in one of two
possible states, and maybe made to change back and forth between those two states.

You have probably heard of bits before in relation to computers, and now you know
what they are. In a computer, the bits are not like the coin or the lock, they are
most like the light. That is, the bits in a computer are places that either have
electricity or they do not. In a computer, the bits are very, very small and there
are a very large number of bits, but that's all that is in there.

Like the light in the living room, the bit is either on or off. In the living room,
there is electricity in the wall coming into the switch. When you turn the switch
on, the electricity goes from the switch, through the wires in the wall and
ceiling, into the light socket and then into the light bulb. So this bit in the
living room is several feet long, it includes the switch, the wires, the socket and
the light bulb.
In a computer, bits are mostly tiny, actually microscopic. Also, the computer bit
doesn't have a mechanical switch at one end or a light bulb at the other. If you
removed the light bulb from the socket in the living room, the switch would still
send electricity to the socket when it was on, and it would still be a bit - you
just wouldn't be able to see whether it was on or off by looking at a light bulb.
Your computer has something resembling switches, like the keys on the keyboard, and
something resembling light bulbs, like the tiny dots on the screen, but most of the
bits are inside and unseen.

(BInary digiT) The smallest element of computer storage. The bit is a single digit
in a binary number containing only 0s and 1s. Physically the bit is a transistor
and capacitor in a RAM cell, a magnetic domain on disk or tape, a cell in a solid
state drive (SSD), a spot on optical media or a voltage pulsing through a circuit.

Transmitting Bits
Bits are used as a measurement for network transmission. For example, one hundred
megabits per second (100 Mbps) means that 100 million pulses are transmitted per
second. See space/time.

Storing Bytes
Eight bits make up a "byte," which is manipulated as one entity. Each byte can
store one alphanumeric character, one decimal digit or a decimal number from 0 to
256 (see binary number and binary values). Measurements of files, databases,
storage drives and memory (RAM) are given in bytes rather than bits. See
space/time, byte and word.
(opera article).

https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/bit

Developed by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at the Bell
Laboratories on December 23, 1947. The transistor (short for "transfer resistance")
is made up of semiconductors. It is a component used to control the amount of
current or voltage or used for amplification/modulation or switching of an
electronic signal. The picture shows several examples of transistors.
The transistor is the primary building block of all microchips, including your CPU
(central processing unit). It is what creates the binary 0's and 1's (bits) your
computer uses to communicate and deal with Boolean logic. When placed in different
configurations, transistors form logic gates, which can combine into arrays called
half adders that also combine into full adders. (opera article)

Transistors are still used in all electronics and likely will be for the
foreseeable future. However, there are some promising technologies, such as carbon
nanotubes being developed by IBM, graphene sheets, and black phosphorus that may
one day replace the transistor.
https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/t/transist.htm

Behind the abstraction

In actuality, a wire isn't exactly "on" or exactly "off". That's an abstraction
that simplifies the details of how computers work. We use abstraction often in
computer science so that we can more easily understand the systems that we're
building. Let's peek behind the hood to see how this abstraction works.

A wire can have varying amounts of electricity flowing through it, but a computer
needs to be able to interpret the electricity in a wire as either definitely 0 or
definitely 1.

In 1947, engineers invented the transistor, a tiny physical device that acts like a
digital switch in computers. The transistor turns on when enough electricity flows
through and stays off otherwise.

How much electricity is "enough"? That depends on the transistor and its threshold
voltage. If an engineer uses a transistor with a threshold voltage of 4.5 volts,
then any voltage of 4.5 or higher will turn the transistor on. At lower voltages,
the transistor stays off.

Consider a computer that needs to determine whether a USB cable is plugged in. When
you plug the cable of a mouse in the computer's USB port, circuitry in the mouse
uses the voltage provided by the port to pull up the voltage in the cable above 3.3
volts. Inside the computer, a transistor detects the high voltage and translates it
to "on" or 1.
This bit of information tells your computer that a USB device is plugged into the
port. (opera article).

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computers-and-internet/
xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:computers/xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:from-electricity-to-bits/a/from-
electricity-to-bits

Note: If you are interested in seeing a transistor level simulation of a CPU, check
this out. Following is only a still image of that, you can try the real simulation
by following this URL. But be cautious though, it eats up a lot of memory.
http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html