Computers from the transistor up
Curated by Claude · 13 videos · 10 hr 41 min
A bottom-up path through the whole machine, made of the explainers and talks Hacker News keeps pointing people to. It opens with Feynman's plain-language picture of what a computer is, then climbs from a single transistor through logic, chip fabrication, a working CPU, memory and caches, the operating system, and ends with lexers, compilers and an interpreter. Watch in order; each video assumes roughly what the ones before it covered.
Play all on YouTube- 11:15:47
Richard Feynman Computer Science Lecture - Hardware, Software and Heuristics
978K views • 14 years agoMuon RayA lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.The welcoming opener: Feynman builds a computer out of a very dumb, very fast filing clerk, the picture to keep in mind for every layer that follows.
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How a transistor works
847K views • 11 years agoBen EaterBen Eater gives a detailed look at how an NPN bipolar junction transistor works and what it does. It is an eleven-minute explanation aimed at building real understanding of the device.The bottom layer, in eleven minutes: Ben Eater explains what a transistor actually does, and HN calls it the most enlightening starting point.
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Making logic gates from transistors
3.1M views • 11 years agoBen EaterBen Eater shows how to build logic gates out of transistors, including NOR gates. It is part of his clear hardware-from-scratch teaching style.One step up, Eater wires transistors into logic gates, the moment switches turn into something that can compute.
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Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips
209K views • 14 years agoAndor GafotasA HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.How billions of those transistors get onto a chip; HN repeatedly calls this HOPE talk the best in-depth introduction to IC manufacturing for any background.
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51:5727c3: Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU (en)
477K views • 15 years agoChristiaan008Michael Steil's 27c3 talk on reverse engineering the MOS 6502 from die shots into a transistor-level simulation, as in the Visual6502 project. It covers going from chip package to a digital model.Going the other way, from die photos back to a transistor-level simulation, shows what a real CPU looks like as a physical layout of gates.
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27:25“Hello, world” from scratch on a 6502 — Part 1
5.9M views • 7 years agoBen EaterBen Eater starts a series building a working computer on breadboards around the 6502 microprocessor. In this first part he gets a 'hello world' running from scratch.That same 6502 on a breadboard: Eater gets a working computer to say hello, which HN calls the best hands-on way to understand a CPU from first principles.
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35:33How does Computer Memory Work? 💻🛠
5.5M views • 4 years agoBranch EducationA 36-minute animated deep dive from Branch Education into how DRAM works. It shows how memory connects to the CPU and how billions of bits are stored in nanoscale capacitor cells. It also covers why DRAM sits between SSDs and the processor.Branch Education's animated tour of DRAM, from capacitor cells to how memory talks to the CPU, praised on HN for being detailed and still easy to follow.
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1:16:58code::dive conference 2014 - Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care
231K views • 11 years agoNOKIA Technology Center WrocławScott Meyers explains how CPU caches work and why they matter for performance, covering cache levels, access speeds, associativity, and effects in multithreaded code. The focus is C++ and cache-aware, data-oriented programming.Between the CPU and that memory sit the caches, and Scott Meyers shows why they quietly decide how fast real programs run.
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27:27AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System
2.2M views • 14 years agoAT&T Tech ChannelA 1982 Bell Labs film hosted by Victor Vyssotsky on the origins and design philosophy of the UNIX operating system, with appearances by Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie. It shows pipes, filters and a shell one-liner spell checker being built.Up to the operating system: Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie explain the kernel, the shell and pipes in a 1982 Bell Labs film HN calls incredibly clear.
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42:54Containers From Scratch • Liz Rice • GOTO 2018
321K views • 8 years agoGOTO ConferencesLiz Rice live-codes a minimal container runtime in a few lines of Go at GOTO Amsterdam 2018. She explains namespaces, control groups and what a host knows about its containers.Liz Rice live-codes a container in a few lines of Go, a hands-on look at the kernel features (namespaces, cgroups) a modern OS gives programs.
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51:18Lexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike
162K views • 15 years agoGoogleFOSSSydneyRob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.The first step of any compiler, turning text into tokens, explained so elegantly by Rob Pike that HN says it is easy to follow with no parsing background.
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1:15:46CppCon 2017: Matt Godbolt “What Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler's Lid”
178K views • 9 years agoCppConMatt Godbolt's CppCon 2017 talk shows what modern compilers do with your C++ code, using Compiler Explorer to inspect generated assembly. It covers surprising optimizations and how the tool works.Matt Godbolt shows the assembly a compiler actually produces, tying the language layer back down to the CPU instructions from earlier in the list.
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![William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [PWL NYC]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OyfBQmvr2Hc/hq2.jpg)
1:31:06William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written" [PWL NYC]
367K views • 9 years agoPapersWeLoveWilliam Byrd presents at Papers We Love NYC on what he calls the most beautiful program ever written, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp. He walks through the metacircular interpreter and related ideas, and demos relational programming and program synthesis near the end.The top of the stack: a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp, a fitting close where a language ends up describing itself.