History on Artur Rios Lab

What Is a Processor? History, Architectures and How a CPU Works

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:00:00 +0000

What Is Programming? described programs as precise descriptions of a process, and What Is an Operating System? described the software that shares a machine between them. This article goes one level further down, to the part that does the work: the processor. It covers what a processor is, how it got from vacuum tubes to tens of billions of transistors, the main ways processors are designed, and, in some detail, how a modern CPU turns instructions into results.

What Is an Operating System? History, Architectures and How It Works

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Every program you have ever written leaned on an operating system without asking. Printing a line, opening a file, allocating memory, waiting for a key press: none of these is something a processor knows how to do. The operating system does them on the program’s behalf, and does them for hundreds of other programs at the same time without letting any of them trample the others.

What Is Programming? followed the history of telling machines what to do. This article follows the program that stands between every other program and the machine: what it is, how it came to exist, the main ways it can be built, and, in some detail, how it actually works.

What Is Programming? A Short History of Telling Machines What to Do

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Ask ten developers what programming is and you will get ten answers: “writing code”, “solving problems”, “telling a computer what to do”. All of them are true, and none of them is quite enough. This article tries to pin the idea down, and then follows it through roughly two centuries of history — because most of what feels arbitrary about programming today makes sense once you know where it came from.