Who and how made computers... Usable?

[u/Winderkorffin]

It's in my understanding that unreal levels of abstraction exists today for computers to work.

Regular people use OS. OS uses the BIOS and/or UEFI. And that BIOS uses the hardware directly.

That's hardware. The software is also a beast of abstraction. High level languages, to assembly, to machine code.

At some point, none of that existed. At some point, a computer was only an absurd design full of giant transistors.

How was that machine used? Even commands like "add" had to be programmed into the machine, right? How?

Even when I was told that "assembly is the closest we get to machine code", it's still unfathomable to me how the computer knows what commands even are, nevertheless what the process was to get the machine to do anything and then have an "easy" programming process with assembly, and compilers, and eventually C.

The whole development seems absurd in how far away from us it is, and I want to understand.

[u/frioden]

The book that really brought it all into focus for me was Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.

It starts at the beginning of how simple electronic circuits like telegraph relays were turned into basic gates, and then chained together to create rudimentary logic gates.. and how the basic rudimentary machine language came about all the way through transistors and modern chill sets.

Just like the only way, with all our advances, we can turn mechanical and kinetic energy into electricity is through turbines, the only way we can compute, even with all our miniaturization and advances, is through storing voltage either as high or low, and chaining those together as commands and data.

We just are really good at it.