These are some thoughts I had when I was young (worded differently now, but keeping the original mood). I always admired computers, they felt like some powerful magic, and I wanted to understand how that magic worked:
A common frequency of CPUs is 3 GHz. What do you mean 3 GHz? Do you mean, like 3 billion times a second? Not like 3 thousand or so? There is something in this machine changing 3 times every nanosecond? I must be mistaken, it probably has some weird niche meaning like "there is one crystal or weird component that oscillates at this specific rate when you hit it". It is obviously impossible that a human-made thing actually operates on the scale of nanoseconds, even the fastest technology I've heard about only works at 60 Hz. But then, how many arithmetic operations can a computer actually do per second? Maybe like a thousand? That would be a lot, I can't even do 1 per minute, but I bet computers are pretty fast. But how do they render in full HD? The screen image looks very clear, so maybe it really has 2 million pixels like they said, and 1000 x 2000 is 2 million, but how does it achieve 60 frames per second? They probably have some weird math going on to make a few calculations result in a full image. But that still sounds so weird, I must have understood something wrong. Well, I want to study and work with this stuff in the future, so I will eventually learn everything.
A few years later, I started to learn programming:
Okay, I can finally test how many operations a computer can actually do, let's ask for a hundred thousand additions and see what happens. It was instant? And what about one billion? Took a bit, maybe one second? What? So computers actually can do billions of operations per second? This doesn't make any sense. I always had something this powerful in my room? What?
On another occasion:
Wait, those .cpp files are tiny, the biggest I've created so far is only 1 kB. So the computer can store, like, millions of these? How? There can't be
