One of my oldest memories harkens back to 1989 — I was a four years old boy in communist Romania. My mother has a PhD in biochemistry, and her father and brother both had a PhD in physics, so it might seem quite unsurprising that I followed in their rational and scientific steps, but it would be hard to put the proverbial finger on how, precisely, that happened. This is what that specific memory is about.
It all started with my frequent stays at my grandparents’ house, a conventional second-floor flat in Bucharest, where my grandmother and grandfather took turns babysitting me while my parents were out hammer-and-sickling (well, laboratory-and-architecturing) the socialist ideal. My grandfather was intent on turning me into a bright scientific mind, so he asked my uncle to build me a computer. Nothing fancy, mind you : it had no operating system worth mentioning, no hard drive, and depended on magnetic tapes and 8″ floppies to actually work. My grandfather showed me a standard BASIC interpreter, and had me type in a program that displayed, line by line, an analog wall clock.
Fascinated, I started spending my days on that thing writing BASIC code, learning how to build increasingly complex programs, and starting my career as a programmer. Or so had my grandfather hoped. A few seconds after discovering computer programming, I discovered computer games, which were a far more fascinating novelty than displaying wall clocks on a screen. I promptly forgot about the BASIC interpreter and for nine long years, I assumed that programming computers was some sort of esoteric arcane art, invisible to the uninitiated, and remained entirely uninterested in it.
Instead, my breakthrough as a rational mind was triggered by the close proximity of two unlikely catalysts : one was a frequent diet of mecha anime (the quality of the Romanian dubbing was hilarious), and the other was a cupboard drawer full of bits and pieces that could, to a child’s mind, be spare parts out of which a robot could be built : wheels, small electrical engines, cables, batteries, microprocessors, light bulbs… as a matter of fact, once I had the basic understanding of how a batteries + cables + engine setup worked, I did build small uninteresting contraptions.
I became intensely interested in building a robot myself. Obviously, I did not have the technical skills or the willpower to follow through with this plan, but I would listen, entranced, to any explanations I would receive that were related to robot-building. My grandfather was writing a book on semiconductors at the time, so he showed me a large digital circuit and let me understand that this is what the brain of a robot would look like — only quite larger !
And so he started teaching me the elementary principles of digital circuits. We spent little time discussing the underlying technical details, and instead concentrated on the simpler abstractions of logical gates. This time, I was fascinated. I would grab a pen and paper and draw circuits for fun. The meaning of AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR and XOR are imprinted in my brain ever since I was five years old… there are few concepts remaining in my brain that have been there for so long.
My circuits behaved like mathematical functions : I would mentally set the input bits, and the output bits would contain the result, so I could build the truth tables that mapped input combinations to output combinations. I experimented with basic arithmetic functions, learning binary as I went. And then one day my grandfather showed me a circuit that I could draw from memory to this day : the RS latch.
The fun thing about the RS latch is that it cannot have a truth table. It is an entirely different beast from arithmetic “write input bits, read output bits” circuits in that it has a state. If you write 1 to the S input bit, the output becomes 1 and remains 1 until you write 1 to the R bit, at which point the output becomes 0, and so on. To say things differently, the S input bit stands for “Set” and sets the output to 1, and the R input bit stands for “Reset” and sets the output to 0. When both R and S are set to 0, then the latch output bit is equal to whatever it was previously set to.
The RS latch is a versatile little thing. It can be used to implement RAM (one of the first things I did with it), or it can be chained to create an incrementing counter.
After a while, my interest in digital circuits faded, but the effects it had on my character were permanent : I now had experience applying abstract rules to abstract concepts, and it was fun.
Article image © Cornelia Kopp — Flickr
The jQuery UI datepicker does strange things with the DOM, which causes undocumented brittleness. For instance, consider the following operations on a page that contains a single input element:
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
Recent Comments