Computers - Software Hardware : Hierarchy: lowest to hightest

anAfrican

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thinking about the question of "computer / internet hierarchy" for a couple days, i came up with this:

at the bottom end are discrete components; resisters, capacitors and diodes;

next would be circuits: transistors, logic gates, adders, comparators, filters built up of discrete components;

combining circuits creates subsystems: video generation, data storage, processing, displaying data and power supplies;

put the appropriate subsystems together and one gets general purpose computers and application specific computing devices (phones, gaming consoles, that thermostat on the wall, watches etc.);

connecting general purpose computers together (ethernet, apple talk, token ring, wireless) gives one a network whether it be a "local area network-LAN" such as one would find in a home or an office, a "metropolitan area network-MAN" such as used by cities, for example, to connect different departments of a municipality (police services [increasingly including patrol vehicles], courts, fire services, etc.), or a "wide area network-WAN" such as the internet.
 
The only deficit is that it focuses primarily on the physical and hardware. Not so much on software, protocols, or even virtualization.
well, this is the "Computer Hardware" subforum, yes?[/I]

besides, gotta get the hardware down in order to introduce the concept of a "software hierarchy". (on-off signals to circuits/logic gates/latches put together in "groups" or "rows" such that the state of the signals on their collective inputs can be read as a long line of on-off [binary], or as a "shorter line" of hexadecimal, leading to an "address" being no more than the collective signals needed to "activate" particular circuits at particular times [the circuits that generate clock signals from the "alternating current" [ac] of the power line are quite interesting {an oscillator is also a circuit made up of discrete components}]. for that matter, an "assembly language" instruction, such as "stor", ultimately breaks down into a string of binary that tells different components whether they should be "on" or "off" controlling which data flows to/from which circuit.)

(been shakin my head watchin y'all's discussions: such an "interesting" mix of mostly, sort of and "well, almost".)

don't mind me; i'm a hardware guy: i know puters from a level lower than the chips!! actually right down to the physics of how/which direction electricity flows.
 

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