An interactive journey in nine dashboards — from a 1936 thought experiment with an infinite paper tape, through the von Neumann blueprint, the cache hierarchy, the end of Moore's free lunch, multi-core coherence, the abstraction stack, compilers and the operating system — all the way to trading systems where a single microsecond is an eternity.
A tape, a head, and a table of rules — the 1936 thought experiment that defined computation. Run one interactively, meet the Bombe from The Imitation Game, and race a spinning disk against a CPU clock.
The 1945 EDVAC report: put the program in the same memory as the data, and software is born. Step a 3-instruction program through fetch–decode–execute and count every trip over the shared bus.
The CPU got fast; memory didn't. Watch a request cascade L1 → L2 → L3 → DRAM on a cold miss, then hit L1 in one nanosecond once warm — plus the "if a cycle were a second" latency ladder.
Transistors doubled every two years — but around 2005, heat stopped the GHz race dead (P ≈ C·V²·f). See the two curves diverge, and why thermodynamics — not choice — created the multi-core era.
Private caches must agree: watch the MESI protocol keep four cores coherent, see false sharing wreck performance, and learn why a contended spinlock floods the ring bus.
From electrons to applications: ten layers of abstraction, the user/kernel boundary,
and the ISA contract. Follow print("hello") all the way down the stack and
back up to photons.
Three routes from source code to silicon: C++ compiles ahead of time, Java JIT-compiles the hot paths, Python interprets every iteration. Race the same loop in all three and see exactly why C/C++ is ~100× faster.
Three illusions: your own CPU (the scheduler), your own memory (page tables + MMU), and simple devices (syscalls + drivers). Step through time slices, a page fault, and a full read() syscall.
Inspired by Carl Cook's CppCon talk. Everything Parts 1–8 built — and how HFT bypasses half of it: kernel bypass, DDIO, warm caches, branch-free hot paths. 18 µs vs 2.8 µs.