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We had a course like that and I absolutely loved it. It's the most fun I've ever had in an educational setting.

It followed such a lovely flow, starting with the absolute lowest level of computing (binary maths, diodes, transistors, and building logic gates with these) and kept on combining these building blocks until we arrived at modern computers and software.

Even if you're just a "modern age" developer that only ever uses modern programming languages, just understanding how everything is built makes you make better decisions all around.



Any books/courses like that out in the open?


Go through the Ben Eater channel on YouTube. It'll get you up to speed with early 80s computing. Computers quickly stop feeling like magic after you grasp the basics. Watching him build a VGA card should be enough to intuit how Pong was made.


One which gets mentioned often is NAND 2 Tetris, which starts with basic logic gates and progresses to produce a simple computer:

https://www.nand2tetris.org/


Also try nandgame.com




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