I always look at things like this and say that I wish I understood every step of the process, from electrical theory to fabrication.
I have the same approach to software, but I have to keep reminding myself that the things I'm trying to understand took hundreds of people to complete. It's an incredibly annoying internal struggle. I have no idea how to deal with it aside from grinding it all out until I die.
Author here: I don't understand every step of the process either :-) But old chips like this at least seem theoretically possible to comprehend in their entirety. I expect it would be pretty much impossible to reverse-engineer and understand a present-day processor with billions of transistors instead of thousands. But I could be surprised - 35 years from now people may be reverse-engineering Xeon chips for fun. And perhaps posting about interesting things they found in Intel's random number circuitry.
It's in really early stages of development, and the BIOS barely boots. Nevertheless, I enjoy reading the code and trying to understand how it works.
I am trying to help him out with it, but I know very little about this kind of stuff (I am just starting out learning about hardware), so I haven't been of much help.
Since you are knowledgeable in this subject area you can help him hack on it if you're interested!
4 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 15.1 ms ] threadIt's also sobering to think about how long it would take using a similar process to understand a modern, 20 nanometer chip.
I have the same approach to software, but I have to keep reminding myself that the things I'm trying to understand took hundreds of people to complete. It's an incredibly annoying internal struggle. I have no idea how to deal with it aside from grinding it all out until I die.
I am currently trying to learn more about the hardware and lower-level aspects of computer, and this was a really interesting read.
You may be interested in checking out an emulator for original IBM computer my friend wrote:
https://github.com/Alegend45/IBM5150
It's in really early stages of development, and the BIOS barely boots. Nevertheless, I enjoy reading the code and trying to understand how it works.
I am trying to help him out with it, but I know very little about this kind of stuff (I am just starting out learning about hardware), so I haven't been of much help.
Since you are knowledgeable in this subject area you can help him hack on it if you're interested!