The ideas behind making a general purpose modern computer like we have today from there are not hugely difficult to get some intuition for.
If you wanna get only actually slightly more complicated than everything I explained there about how I see computers, you can switch gears to imagining actually trying to create a Minecraft computer you can code and play computer games on.
Having a wiring system like redstone could automate all the logic of how the states change if you were clever enough with how you designed it. You could also design a similar, more mechanical computer using switches that actually flip on and off based on an initial state and go from there in real life. A computer scientist from the future in a society that do very little, if anything, with electricity like we have today could actually make a computer like this over a long course of time and wow the people of the past before computers got invented.
Turing was actually just solving a maths problem, so any kind of invention that can be made to solve the same kind of problem (especially in an automated way) was a device essentially equivalent to Turing’s computer.
You could design a computer in Minecraft (or in real life), that actually just had switches or buttons for user input, with all the other switches being hidden somewhere else and flipping automatically in complicated ways to activate or deactivate pixels on a screen. This would be way faster than the “Information Technology worker” (who would need a lot of specialist knowledge and skills about how the computer was built) from before, and you could much more easily make a general purpose computer from there.
That more mechanical or Minecraft-y computer is only in theory a little bit more sophiscated (since it follows the same basic rules anyway), but can be made to do anything we do on computers today by building up enough coding. Someone with enough technical knowledge could write their own full compiler tower for a computer/CPU architecture and go all the way to writing high level interpreters so their machine can run modern Python code.
In the early days of computers, when some very technically skilled people had access to computers they could write assembly on, the only next step would be to write a general purpose operating system (instead of just having one set of instructions to do a particular thing), which is easier than it sounds for a handful of experts across the world.
A general purpose computer with an operating system in the early days would have started up to a command prompt where you could start processes in the shell that the kernel would store values from and flip between while the switches were going crazy and making flipping (or probably a lot of whirring) noises.
You could write and run any program on that kind of computer with a general purpose OS, and the operating systems we use today were written by teams of very clever people only a few decades in the past who were quick to think about this.
Programs stored on your computer could be ran from the shell, and you could easily write your own simple ones to do more complicated calculations like factorials. You could start trying to do things like give a very precise estimate for pi based on a mathematical series by writing a computer program. Again, computers are basically calculators and any kind of calculator you can find that makes you not have to manually add stuff on bits of paper is arguably a kind of computer.
These computers were the best kind of calculators ever invented, though. They were a cutting edge technology that a kind of scientist with coding skills could use to run complicated calculations. This was the start of “computer labs” and “computer scientists” that were glorified coders, but not glorified engineers.
If we go back to what this kind of computer looks like internally, a computer lab was only actually one computer. The computer was made from huge stacks of towers of circuits that were connected and did different things. The computer would have rows of different early keyboards with outdated cables paired with old screens that only displayed monochrome text to people sat at desks doing maths.
If you were an early computer scientist and what you cared about was doing mathematical and scientific calculations, this is what computing was like in around the 70s (I think).
There weren’t any videogames or consoles that anyone cared about. A pong console or Atari were available around this time, but very few if any people actually enjoyed playing them.
If you’ve ever seen the Angry Video Game Nerd, or AVGN, (especially his early videos) on Youtube, he introduced these kinds of computers to a far younger generation. His videos show what it’s like to play games on them. Kids with more advanced consoles would watch him to see what playing videogames was originally like.
AVGN amused the vast majority of people in his target audience just by showing these games and cussing at them while trying to play. The videos were in a way set in the 70s, and his humour in the early AVGN videos was about complaining about gaming in the 70s and early 80s. He’s a collector of old computers who acts out what it would be like to live in a time where that was your computer. You could even think of his persona as being a computer scientist who only had digital videogame machines (a limited form of computer) and couldn’t do anything he wanted on them.
But for all the computer scientists had, computer labs had no graphics. Early consoles had graphics. The advantage of a computer scientist’s computer was that you could write out calculations to do and make your own programs.
Most consoles AVGN shows from around the 70s or early 80s were not general purpose computers at all. They didn’t run an operating system or kernel, really.
From there, we can get to a “modern computer” that “feels like magic” easily. You could do the same things even if your computer was huge as you could on an actual modern laptop. It would be way slower because of the less intricate and fast-running circuitry, but the modern fully general purpose computer that does almost anything you want it to is quite trivial to make from this point given the time.
What we actually want is a general purpose computer that’s almost just like what we have today. It should be able to program stuff AND render graphics. How this actually happened in computing history started with Unix, and parts of Unix are still a standard on almost every computer used today that’s hard to ever change.
The ideas behind making a general purpose modern computer like we have today from there are not hugely difficult to get some intuition for.
If you wanna get only actually slightly more complicated than everything I explained there about how I see computers, you can switch gears to imagining actually trying to create a Minecraft computer you can code and play computer games on.
Having a wiring system like redstone could automate all the logic of how the states change if you were clever enough with how you designed it. You could also design a similar, more mechanical computer using switches that actually flip on and off based on an initial state and go from there in real life. A computer scientist from the future in a society that do very little, if anything, with electricity like we have today could actually make a computer like this over a long course of time and wow the people of the past before computers got invented.
Turing was actually just solving a maths problem, so any kind of invention that can be made to solve the same kind of problem (especially in an automated way) was a device essentially equivalent to Turing’s computer.
You could design a computer in Minecraft (or in real life), that actually just had switches or buttons for user input, with all the other switches being hidden somewhere else and flipping automatically in complicated ways to activate or deactivate pixels on a screen. This would be way faster than the “Information Technology worker” (who would need a lot of specialist knowledge and skills about how the computer was built) from before, and you could much more easily make a general purpose computer from there.
That more mechanical or Minecraft-y computer is only in theory a little bit more sophiscated (since it follows the same basic rules anyway), but can be made to do anything we do on computers today by building up enough coding. Someone with enough technical knowledge could write their own full compiler tower for a computer/CPU architecture and go all the way to writing high level interpreters so their machine can run modern Python code.
In the early days of computers, when some very technically skilled people had access to computers they could write assembly on, the only next step would be to write a general purpose operating system (instead of just having one set of instructions to do a particular thing), which is easier than it sounds for a handful of experts across the world.
A general purpose computer with an operating system in the early days would have started up to a command prompt where you could start processes in the shell that the kernel would store values from and flip between while the switches were going crazy and making flipping (or probably a lot of whirring) noises.
You could write and run any program on that kind of computer with a general purpose OS, and the operating systems we use today were written by teams of very clever people only a few decades in the past who were quick to think about this.
Programs stored on your computer could be ran from the shell, and you could easily write your own simple ones to do more complicated calculations like factorials. You could start trying to do things like give a very precise estimate for pi based on a mathematical series by writing a computer program. Again, computers are basically calculators and any kind of calculator you can find that makes you not have to manually add stuff on bits of paper is arguably a kind of computer.
These computers were the best kind of calculators ever invented, though. They were a cutting edge technology that a kind of scientist with coding skills could use to run complicated calculations. This was the start of “computer labs” and “computer scientists” that were glorified coders, but not glorified engineers.
If we go back to what this kind of computer looks like internally, a computer lab was only actually one computer. The computer was made from huge stacks of towers of circuits that were connected and did different things. The computer would have rows of different early keyboards with outdated cables paired with old screens that only displayed monochrome text to people sat at desks doing maths.
If you were an early computer scientist and what you cared about was doing mathematical and scientific calculations, this is what computing was like in around the 70s (I think).
There weren’t any videogames or consoles that anyone cared about. A pong console or Atari were available around this time, but very few if any people actually enjoyed playing them.
If you’ve ever seen the Angry Video Game Nerd, or AVGN, (especially his early videos) on Youtube, he introduced these kinds of computers to a far younger generation. His videos show what it’s like to play games on them. Kids with more advanced consoles would watch him to see what playing videogames was originally like.
AVGN amused the vast majority of people in his target audience just by showing these games and cussing at them while trying to play. The videos were in a way set in the 70s, and his humour in the early AVGN videos was about complaining about gaming in the 70s and early 80s. He’s a collector of old computers who acts out what it would be like to live in a time where that was your computer. You could even think of his persona as being a computer scientist who only had digital videogame machines (a limited form of computer) and couldn’t do anything he wanted on them.
But for all the computer scientists had, computer labs had no graphics. Early consoles had graphics. The advantage of a computer scientist’s computer was that you could write out calculations to do and make your own programs.
Most consoles AVGN shows from around the 70s or early 80s were not general purpose computers at all. They didn’t run an operating system or kernel, really.
From there, we can get to a “modern computer” that “feels like magic” easily. You could do the same things even if your computer was huge as you could on an actual modern laptop. It would be way slower because of the less intricate and fast-running circuitry, but the modern fully general purpose computer that does almost anything you want it to is quite trivial to make from this point given the time.
What we actually want is a general purpose computer that’s almost just like what we have today. It should be able to program stuff AND render graphics. How this actually happened in computing history started with Unix, and parts of Unix are still a standard on almost every computer used today that’s hard to ever change.