It's possible to descend to lower levels, if given enough curiosity. Some people just want to know how things work under the hood.
I can remember starting to program our brand new PET-2001 in BASIC (at 13 years old or so). After a while I became bored with the sluggishness of BASIC, and the cramped memory space. Only very small BASIC programs would fit. But there was a new challenge! I wanted to discover what made the PET really tick -- how did it understand BASIC? Then I learnt about ROMs, RAMs and the 6502 CPU, and how to program it in machine language. It was similar to programming programmable calculators, which I'd done since I was 9. But the 6502 worked much more faster, and had a rich instruction set, compared to those old calculators; and a much better screen, with graphics!
Since I was a kid, I always wanted to look into the inside of toys how they worked, for example, my 'Brummkreisel'[1] spintop. At 6, I wanted to open my hamster to look inside, but my mother wouldn't allow it... (Otherwise maybe I'd be a surgeon nowadays ;-)
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It's possible to descend to lower levels, if given enough curiosity. Some people just want to know how things work under the hood.
I can remember starting to program our brand new PET-2001 in BASIC (at 13 years old or so). After a while I became bored with the sluggishness of BASIC, and the cramped memory space. Only very small BASIC programs would fit. But there was a new challenge! I wanted to discover what made the PET really tick -- how did it understand BASIC? Then I learnt about ROMs, RAMs and the 6502 CPU, and how to program it in machine language. It was similar to programming programmable calculators, which I'd done since I was 9. But the 6502 worked much more faster, and had a rich instruction set, compared to those old calculators; and a much better screen, with graphics!
Since I was a kid, I always wanted to look into the inside of toys how they worked, for example, my 'Brummkreisel'[1] spintop. At 6, I wanted to open my hamster to look inside, but my mother wouldn't allow it... (Otherwise maybe I'd be a surgeon nowadays ;-)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brummkreisel_BW_2011-08-12...