Tata Says

  • Introduction

    For as long as we can remember, we built instruments, yantras, physical objects that provide to us and convey to others access to ever deeper levels of consciousness. Straddling the boundary of consciousness and the level of control we can exert over the physical world around us, they are as much an intrinsic and defining Continue reading

  • Part 1: Layers

    Over time we developed layers upon layers of abstractions to be able to make programming practical.  At the lowest level is physical hardware, the electronics. Overall this differs from one computer model to next, from one type of CPU to next. It’s a nightmare. These days you very rarely need to even think about it Continue reading

  • Part 2: All You Need is Something and Nothing

    Oddly, the part about about the actual magic that lets us generate meaning from hardware, is the most tedious one. The fact that we can find ways to represent all the symbols that have meaning to us using sequences of nothing and something is exciting, even inspiring: we can generate meaning out of so little. Continue reading

  • Part 3: Hiding the Machines

    Operating systems are where things start sounding familiar to normal people. It is software that gets run (almost) first when a computer starts. There are standardised protocols but in short: when a machine is turned on it first runs a bit of code that it keeps in a special memory chip built into the motherboard Continue reading

  • Part 4: Machines Talk to Each Other

    Networks are a bunch of computers linked up with cables, or something else, that let them send bytes to each other. The connection is often by radio waves: wi-fi, mobile networks, satellites; but for the longest time it was just cables, and they are still the fastest way to send data, and most stable. That’s Continue reading

  • Part 5: Talking to Machines

    In the beginning, there was machine code. Long lists of pure bit patterns encoding instructions known to the CPU, memory addresses, and numbers.  It was hard, but this is how computers work. To make it easier, we gave names to the instruction bit patterns, and started using numbers in decimal, octal, and hexadecimal notation. We Continue reading

  • Part 6: Telling Stories

    The only important things when programming computers are thinking and the communication about thinking.  Not a very strong statement, I know, applies to everything; so why is it helpful? Because we built all this knowledge and the machines themselves in a furious search for meaning, in a time when the meaning was crumbling all around Continue reading

  • Part 7: Making Machines Think

    We always wondered about knowledge, truth, and being. In every civilisation we built, while learning how to construct roads, houses, and societies, we were also constructing systems of thought and methods to try and describe how we think, learn, and deduce truths. These were so precious to us that even during long centuries where commerce Continue reading

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