4
SWITCHES
Switching one signal on and off in response to the state of another signal is a fundamental ingredient of computation. It’s what separates a limited machine like the Jacquard loom from a general-purpose machine such as Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Whereas the Jacquard loom can only ever perform a predetermined sequence of operations and can’t change that sequence in response to what’s happening, the Analytical Engine has instructions that can evaluate the state of a register and jump around the program in response to that evaluation. Switching makes this possible.
From basic switches, we can build more sophisticated devices like logic ...
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