Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my.

And the world. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast episode 93,

How Computers Work Part 3, Logic Gates and Components.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we're going to continue on from where we left off in the previous episode,

and explain how we can use transistors to build logic gates, and in turn how we can use logic gates to implement different logical circuitry components that are used in processes in modern computers.

Before we get to that, however, we need to talk about Boolean, algebra, and logic to explain why these logic gates are so important.

Recommended pre-listening for this episode should fairly obviously be a previous episode

How Computers Work Part 2 in order to give you the background about how transistors work

and how they're relevant to gate design.

So let's jump in and start talking about Boolean algebra and logic. Bullion

algebra is a branch of algebra in which the values of the variables can only be true or false, usually

donated as 1 and 0. In elementary algebra, which you would have learned at high school,

the main operations are the usual arithmetic operations of plus minus division multiplication,

and the variables just at any old number.

In Boolean algebra, the variables can only be zeros and ones.

The key operations are the logical operations of awe and and negation.

It is a useful formalism for describing logical relations in the same way that ordinary algebra describes numerical relations between different quantities.

Now, as noted in the previous episode, modern digital computers operate under the digital abstraction, which essentially only considers

two possible states of affairs in a circuit. Low voltage or high voltage. There's a threshold.

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