/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11075616
you don't know what a transistor is
a transistor is a gate. if the lock is on, energy doesn't flow through. if it's off, then energy can get through.
the lock is controlled by a third wire.
this lets you make logical decisions.
one thing which you can build out of transistors (quite a few of them) is called a flip flop. there are a couple different types, but the one that's relevant here is the d-q flip flop. a d-q flip flop has one input line and one output line, as well as a control line. whenever the control line is turned on, the flip flop looks at the input line and stores whatever is there. when the control line is turned off, the flip flop ignores whatever is happening to the input line and just keeps whatever it was last time the control was on. so it's a memory cell. at all times, the output line is showing what's in the flip flop.
this is how a computer reads a single bit of memory, through a flipflop which is only allowed to change when a separate control line is on.
but you have to remember that a flip flop is not just one transistor, it is a bunch of them wired together in a clever way (really, they're locking and unlocking each other somehow!) a single transistor cannot remember a thing.
there's the dq flipflop in the image.