The enigmas of computing

Next, a very prodigious and wonderful word, one of my favorites and this is the word enigma. It comes from the Latin aenigma and aenigma is derived from the Greek aenigma.

As the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language indicates, it is masculine, an artificially concealed statement of meaning so that it is difficult to understand or interpret. And it can also be a reality, event, behavior that cannot be understood, that can hardly be understood or interpreted. Actually, a riddle can be said to be a riddle or a question to some problem that is very difficult to comprehend or understand.

It can also be a reference to something that is mysterious.

Source of the definition
For example, a riddle could be a riddle like what is yellow on the outside and black on the inside? And the answer is the pencil. The pencils are yellow on the outside and in the middle they are black, they have a graphite center.

But I want to talk to you today about the enigmas that exist within computing because sometime, I don't know, have you asked how computers work? It's not just the fact that you turn it on and press some keys on your keyboard and the computer makes all of that appear on the screen.

All this is really a very enigmatic process.

The surprising way in which data entry is converted into digital information that the computer can process involves a series of technicalities and quite interesting processes, such as the internal processor that the keyboard has, which helps it interpret which keys have been pressed, this information is converted into zeros and ones that is sent from the keyboard processor, to the processor of what is the computer itself, and the computer processor has a program that has been installed in its integrated processing circuit that interprets all the zeros and ones that the keyboard has sent to it. This information is interpreted (the zeros and ones) and sent by means of an electronic signal to the monitor, then the monitor is in charge of displaying all the zeros and ones on the screen, converting them into pixels; it takes all this information that this processing unit has sent it and turns it into an image that we can interpret. It is a truly fascinating process that is extremely complex and occurs in just seconds! And this is just one of the enigmas that computation holds, because we have several enigmatic parts: we have the part in how this data is communicated from one processor to another, we have the way in which the central processing unit takes care of handle all this data, and in addition to this we have another part that is the data storage part. Each of these processes is highly enigmatic, for example, the data storage process includes a reader that sends a magnetic pulse to a material, to a metal that is the metal from which the hard drive is made, specially made to store magnetism, and this magnetism prints a signal that is interpreted as zeros or ones in this magnetic material, then this reader, which is both a reader and a transmitter, interprets these signals from a magnetic pulse, these zeros and ones, which they are converted into the form of magnetism within this hard drive. The system interprets this data and then it is what we see on our computer screen, whether it is a text in a word processor, a song that we are listening to, a video that we are watching on one of the social networks or even a publication like This is what you are reading right now.

All this goes through these processes of zeros and ones, it's pretty amazing, right? And not to mention the process that has to do with programming logic.

Programs that perform different tasks and that give orders to the computer: for example, to draw a line of a certain color on the screen or to erase it, to make or emit a specific sound by giving it a combination of specific zeros and ones.

The way the whole computer works is extremely enigmatic and extremely interesting. Here in this publication I am only giving a superficial view of how the computer can operate, how computers handle processes in a very general way, because if I started to explain each of the different processes it would take a very long amount of time and This would probably be the subject of several posts. But this, in a very general way, is how computers process data and these are the enigmas that exist within the computer, within data processing, within programming and within all the beauty of computing, amazing right?.