Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Back in high school I found in the library a wonderful text. It was a huge 
> hardback book about 3 or 4 cm thick.  It started with vacuum tubes, tube 
> diodes and triodes, then went into semiconductor tech, including what a 
> semiconductor *is*, how the doping affects its behavior, how a diode works, 
> an LED, a transistor, a thermistor, etc. Then into chips, how to make 
> transistors on a chip, how the doping is done, then gates from that.

> I wish so much I remembered what that book is called. It taught me 90% of 
> what I know about hardware.

> After that, the SAM'S book on the 8080 pretty much taught me the basics of 
> computer architecture, instruction sets, etc.

  Do you really need to know how a vacuum tube works in order to know how
a modern computer works?

  I mean, it may be interesting knowledge in a historical sense, but is
there any practical application to this knowledge? (In computing science,
that is. In guitar amps vacuum tubes are quite popular, although for a
slightly different reason.)

> It's a shame in some ways that everything has gotten so complicated that you 
> wind up with either a quantum physics textbook or a "Teach Yourself 
> Microsoft Word in 24 hours" sort of book, and nothing really in between that 
> I know of.

  I'm sure there are in-between books as well.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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