Ahh, back in the days when a human could comprehend these things. Do you ever get the feeling we’re already living in a Culture novel?
I learned most of my basic understanding of a computer from a BBC Model B. I used to love looking through the circuit schematics (I still have a fondness for the 6502), figuring out how all the chips interacted. These day…not a hope. Even if the circuit diagrams were published, so much is integrated into each chip it’d be hard to make anything from them. I was trying to figure out how to drive the (supposedly open) PXIe bus the other day, and I still have no idea.
If you want to know what’s going on at the OS level (rather than the hardware), you can always run Linux. If you know exactly which bit you’re interested in, that’s useful. If you want a broad but deep view, I’m not sure anyone has that anymore. Have the machines already taken over?
