I think one of the things that make computers feel like magic to people, even computer professionals, is the sheer range of magnitudes involved.
- 16EiB (264 ~ 16 × 1018): memory addressable in a 64-bit machine
- 4GiB (232 ~ 4 × 109)
- 64KiB (216 = 64 × 103)
- 1ms (10-3)
- 1µs (10-6)
- 1ns (10-9)
- 0.3ns (3 × 10-9): cycle time of a modern CPU
That’s more than 27 decimal orders of magnitude pulling against each other all inside one box. This is what physicists call “astronomical”. Hobbyist precision machining commonly deals with a measly fives orders of magnitude. Twenty-seven orders is beyond the human capacity to imagine. Is it any wonder people cannot imagine how computers work?