3.1: Introduction

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There is an old adage, “A journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step”. The hardest part of any project is getting started. I had taught Computer Organization for years but had always used virtual circuits to describe the components presented in this text. That meant using pictures, drawings, and eventually tools such as Logisim. Though I knew the circuits in this book, I was afraid to actually touch the hardware. From my conversations with others, this is not an uncommon feeling even among computer scientists. Like so many people in so much of life, I was afraid of the beginning.

The beginning, when all the fears about the project are apparent. Do I really know enough to do the project? Will it take a lot longer than I think? What happens if I hit a problem that I cannot solve? Too often these fears take over, and useful projects just fail to get started. But once the project is started, the unknowns become known and can be dealt with. The complexity becomes manageable. Incremental progress can be achieved, and each success builds on the last. The trick is to start very simple, and to allow the complexity to evolve. This is the approach of this text.

This text starts as simply as possible. To begin studying circuits, the first step is to understand that digital circuits take electricity into the circuit, and convert it to an output. In our case, the input will always be a switch, and output will always be a LED light. So the first project is a circuit which has a switch which turns on a light.