>>323725
>>323735
I suggest you either play Turing Complete, follow the NAND2Tetris "course" online, and/or watch Ben Eater's jewtube channel starting with the early videos and maybe buy one of his breadboard kits.
All three teach you how to make a CPU using basic logic gates, as well as how said gates work. I've ordered them roughly from most to least easily interactive, with TC being an easy click to place components and draw lines program, N2T requiring programming in Hardware Definition Language, and the latter being just videos with actual IRL chips and parts and all the pitfalls that come with real electrical engineering. That said, watching Ben's videos is probably helpful regardless of what option you pick, especially if you get stuck on something.
In all three of these things, you start off learning just the raw hardware aspect, then eventually put that together to build something capable of executing arbitrary instructions from ROM, AKA a computer.
When you get good at this, you both are capable of making something using pure hardware, as well as understand how (assembly) code actually functions. This both demystifies programming and reveals that there isn't actually a ton of difference between the pure hardware and software, beyond the ease of altering "what the system does" using code.
As an offside, I menti