Just as little experiment, as a part of a larger journey to try to understand how computers work, I started to learn the programming language C on my free time. I have only ever studied Japanese, linguistics and didactics… For a few months now, I have been able to make a program that prints various stuff on the screen using the commonly known function printf. This, of course, didn’t satisfy me at all, since this doesn’t tell me how the displaying of characters on my screen is actually happening. To make a somewhat forced comparison, I’m using a toaster to toast a slice of bread, but I have no idea how the heating strings inside the toaster become hot. In order to understand “the toaster”, I tried to dig up a piece of the source code responsible for making “my bread crispy and delicious”. Well…
Can something be DISHEARTENING and fun at the same time?
Don’t give up, OP. It can be very rewarding to know how basic things in the C standard library such as printf() work, at a lower level.
The hardest concept when I first learned C, so many many years ago, was pointers. But understanding memory access at the low level opens up insights into computer architecture in a very powerful manner.
Sadly computers these days are very, very complex and modern operating systems and ‘frameworks’ abstract away the inner workings to such a high level that it can be hard to understand. If you really want to learn the fundamentals it might actually be a good (and fun!) exercise to work on a small microcontroller project (such as the Atmel AVR series) or an 8 or 16-bit retro system. If you don’t have real hardware it can be done via emulation.
Just my opinion, but: don’t study x86 CPU architecture until you’ve looked at others like the 6502, z80 or 68000, or I suppose ARM). Though, they’ll probably ruin you for x86 since it’s the ugliest and most confusing of the bunch, yet ironically won the “CPU wars” years ago.