Mission

Being a long-time programmer that did not understand any electronics and computer architecture, I was haunted by the ghost in the machine that caused many insecurities and feelings of not belonging to my operating environment. With time, it escalated to the point of no return and I was faced with a decision – all or nothing!

By the grace of finding authors devoted to different aspects of electronics, from electronics basics to building a Pong game and computer architecture, I was blessed by the courage to take a leap of faith and decide to learn electronics, and am on that path ever since.

Since I was a total electronics beginner, I had to start from the diode in order to understand the transistor. With transistors, I was able to build gates, and gates served me to build chips – adders, multiplexers, decoders…, the Pong game, the 4-bit processor, and finally complete Z80 computer with monitor, keyboard, sound, and cassette recorder.

This website takes you, dear reader, to that path, throughout which I follow a very simple paradigm – in order to use a component, we must disassemble it to the greatest detail possible, prove its workings and understand it. It then becomes a building block of our comprehension.

For me, this process is fulfilling to the point that it makes me sincerely secure and happy. This website is my way of giving back, and I am willing to share it freely, in order to honor the brilliance of electronics and all the authors that helped me to reach this point.

Finally, I am very thankful for being friends with Željko Stojanović, whose passion for electronics is highly motivating, and to whom I am deeply grateful for participating in this project as a technical reviewer and adviser. For that matter, please note that I take whole responsability for possible inaccuracies, if present in content. If such found, please let me know to correct them.

Daniel Bele