Question: how do computers work

Joe Spencer answered on 18 Mar 2015:

Good question.
The hardware in computers relies on the premise of a thing called transistors. Think of it like a switch, if you had a light switch you can turn it on and off on being 1 and off being 0. that’s the basis of binary communication. if i turned a light on and off i could transmit a message like SOS to you.
Now turning these switches on and off is difficult by hand, as you need to do it a few million times per second, and there’s billions of them in a computer. So we use electricity to turn it on and off. Linking all these together forms the basis of a processor which is the key to a computer
There’s lots of other bits that go in computers but essentially they’re machines that add numbers together really quickly