Re: Consciousness: what's the problem?

On Sep 9, 7:13 pm, Don Geddis <d...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My real complaint was about the final sentence:
After you master this you will know all you really need to know about
digital computers.
which seems to imply that if you understand the hardware up to an MPU, then
there is nothing more about computers that is difficult to understand.

My counter is that understanding low level hardware gives you very little
insight into high level algorithms and applications.

This has been beaten to death. Do we want to know how a computer
works, or about ways it has been used. There are many people who are
knowledgeable about WORD.
Few of these people know how a computer works, and those who do know
it from other sources, not WORD.

Incidentally, why harp on WORD, a mundane application program. Why not
put up Photoshop, a beautiful piece of software.

Very few programmers today know anything about assembly language, much less
machine code, much less the underlying hardware. They program in Java or
C or Lisp or Perl or PHP. And use standards like HTML and MPEG and GIF.

Even machine code will not lead you to understand how the contents of
a register is placed on a buss, or moved from a buss to a register.
Machine code must be broken into parts, and the parts exercised as
micro code. This is how a computer works.

In a very real sense, the micro-code is the computer. When the 360
came out, the salesmen were upset. “You’re going to lose a *** pot
full of 1401 customers”, they said. “No problem”, the engineers said..
They just wrote micro-code to execute 1401 instructions, and the 1401
emulator was born. At the touch of a switch, the 360 became a 1401.
The customer was happy.

Do we still have 1401 programs running out there in the year 2008??
Probably!

Ray
.

Loading