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Re:How do I make a computer by Gibbon1 on Friday July 28, 2023 @04:25PM (#36912799)
My suggestion just do a few embedded projects. After that you'll basically understand how computers work. Most embedded is basic enough to get the gist of. Where a modern computer you'll get swamped with too much complexity.

Semtech has some dev boards and tutorials for connecting to Lorawan. Notably it all seems to just work if you follow the directions. Not true for a lot of other development boards and software.

Re:How do I make a computer by RetroTechie on Friday July 28, 2023 @08:00PM (#36915064)
Reading between the lines, I suspect OP just wants to get a feel for 'the turtles' that are all the way down... :-)

If so, I second Gibbon1's:

> just do a few embedded projects.

Easiest entry: download a simulator for microcontroller (family) you have in mind. One that lets you single-step through assembler instructions, see effect on registers, CPU flags, memory contents, I/O pin state, etc.

Get 'close to the metal': eg. grab an Arduino + USB <-> JTAG (and/or serial) thingie, download IDE, work through "blinkie LED" example project.

From there, explore some of the integrated peripherals & what you can do with those:

Pulse Width Modulation (both in hardware, or software) as a kind of poor man's analog output.

Hook up character LCD display. Or graphic one, and code some mini games a la "snake", tetris or the like. A few I/O pins, buttons, couple of lines assembly code & presto! You've built a joystick from scratch.

Hook up sensors, relais, or some sensor network LAN stuff, etc etc.

WHATEVER seems interesting. Once you've done a number of such projects (and written a decent amount of assembly code), write some small C programs for the microcontroller, and see what assembly code it's translated into. Or write a small Forth system. See how such things change your perspective from programmer -> low level hardware.

From there on up, it's just layers upon layers of (mostly arbitrary) abstraction. Some 'invisible', some with a huuuge performance cost.

Quad core x86-64 is just a really fast 8051 with more & wider registers + bigger instruction set + huge amount of RAM. ;-)

Re:How do I make a computer by Gibbon1 on Saturday July 29, 2023 @02:20AM (#36917454)
Another historical thing that is simple to understand is old school micro-coded CPU's. Obsolete but if you understand how one works everything that comes after is just implementing the same thing mostly.