Thanks for the memories

I apologize for the all-too-long post last time. It probably should have been two posts. Today, however, I want to paint a mental picture.

Imagine you are in an empty void, floating high above what looks like a thin, straight line starting directly beneath you, but stretching on extremely far ahead of you. You are slowly floating down to where this line begins. As you get closer, you notice that the line is not as narrow as you first had supposed. You get closer still and notice that this entire line is comprised of a series of bathtubs. These bathtubs each have a sign next to them with a number. The one directly below you is marked "0." Next to it is bathtub "1." The furthest you can read with your naked eye seems to be bathtub "23," but you can tell that all of the bathtubs in the line have increasing numers the further away they get from you, so you assume the numbering system just continues on forever.

You finally touch down next to bathtub "0." Strangely enough, this bathtub is not full of water or even Jell-o, but rather it is full of buckets. 8 buckets right in a row. Of course you assume that the buckets are full of Jell-o, but this isn't the case either. The buckets have numbers in them, single binary digits, one digit per bucket. 8 digits per bathtub. Some buckets have 0b0, and some have 0b1.

These bathtubs do not have regular faucets to fill them with water. Instead, where the faucet should be, there are two buttons. One is marked "load," and the other, "store." You look around, and finding yourself alone decide that it wouldn't hurt anyone to try out these buttons. You reach out with your left hand and timidly press the load button of bathtub 0. Electricty runs through your left hand, up your arm, across your body and down to your right hand, where suddenly appears the binary number 0b1101 1000 floating above the palm of your right hand. Don't worry, it doesn't hurt. You notice that this is the exact same binary number that is in the bathtub. It's as if the load button copied the value of the bathtub into your hand.

You next try the store button. Again, electricity runs through your body, this time from right to left, but the value of bathtub 0 remains unchanged. That's odd. Next you decide to try an experiment where you load the value of one bathtub, and try to store it somewhere else. You press load again on bathtub 0, and again the value 0b1101 1000 appears in your right hand. You move to bathtub 1, which has the value 0b0000 0000, and press its store button. Suddenly bathtub 1's value changes to match the value in your hand, and the value that was in bathtub 1 is lost forever. After some more experimentation of loading values from various bathtubs and storing them into other bathtubs, you start to reach the limits of how much fun you can have with this.

It gets boring moving numbers around if that's all you can do. You start wishing you could do something else with these numbers. You wish you could at least add them together (see, I told you addition was going to be important), and do something interesting with the loaded numbers before you store them away again.

And then you wake up. Or something. I'm not very good at endings for dream sequences. Next time we'll talk about the interpretation of the dream, and what these bathtubs and buckets have to do with real computers.