Knowledge Nuggets From The Past

Yesterday was quite a demanding day as I was working on several articles for the two blogs I have, and at the end of the day, I thought that my brain would not give me anything more. It was totally drained.

But I was wrong.

I was retiring for the day, and then I had kind of flashbacks. It was the time I was doing my bachelors in MIT (Manipal) and also, I was giving classes for some juniors in another institute. I was specializing as an electronics and communication engineer, and the classes I was taking was for C programming. I had learnt C programming even before I had joined the engineering stream.

And in that class, there was this fellow, by the name Bhramanand - I know an odd name, even in India. It roughly meant 'Bliss'. Odd was his name, but it was more odd of him than the other students in asking questions. He would keep asking how somethings worked. How a particular functiton worked the way it did? When I answered that, supplying him with information on lower level function, he would come back with the same question. How did those things work?

I let out a sigh, and I knew I had to tell him all the story. He was from Computer Science background, and explaining him the electronics, I thought, would be hard. But as I began to explain him, right from the electron transfers at the transistor level, building up to gates, to ALU (arithimetic and logic units), and to processors, and to memory transfers and assembly level language, he caught on quite well.

Now I realize that it was not just his exceptional learning urge, or even the way I told the story, that made it easy to understand. The whole design was an evolution and it had followed patters. It is quite interesting and I think, I will spend some time the coming weeks on researching some more things, asking few friends who have remained in that field, and whip out some good set of articles to go in Splat.