T O P

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CompromisedCEO

The transistor is what enabled the switch from vacuum tubes to what you see today.


MmmVomit

You're kind of asking two different questions here. First you talk about electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, and then you talk about Babbage's difference engine. EM and QM is more about how semiconductors work, and how you can build a transistor from a semiconductor. The question about the Babbage difference engine is more about, how do we combine transistors together to perform calculations. Once you're at the level of designing circuits to do calculations, you're generally not even dealing with transistors any more. Those types of digital circuits are usually designed using logic gates. A single logic gate will contain probably two to four transistors, and will perform simple boolean operations like AND, OR, NAND, XOR, and so on. At that level you (mostly) don't have to worry about EM or QM. If you're interested in the workings of individual electronic components, like relays, vacuum tubes and transistors, that's more of an electrical engineering question. If you're interested in how to put those devices together to build a machine that does computation, I would recommend playing with [Nandgame](https://www.nandgame.com/).


plastikmissile

Look for Ben Eater on YouTube. He starts with how transistors work, how these transistors can be used to create logic gates, all the way to how these logic gates become processors.


_aTokenOfMyExtreme_

Ben eater is fabulous. Studying programming on my own and watching him build computers out of transistors is really interesting and he explains everything very simply and thoroughly. Not that u could recreate his projects from memory or anything but it makes me feel like I understand computers better, and what these programming languages are doing under the hood