Interesting, I've always though that at a conceptual level computers are not especially complicated machines (for example a turing machine) and most reasonably intelligent people shouldn't have any problem understanding them.
It's also interesting that you mention the holistic approach because this is exactly how many people view computers, in the same way they might view a mechanical device. I have seen people reason "If a reboot doesn't fix it , maybe 2 or 3 reboots in quick succession will".
It's also scary how many professional IT people seem to have a cargo cult understanding of computers.
I've seen people do all kinds of crazy incantations , for example troubleshooting a network problem by re-installing OS software on multiple workstations and trying different combinations of firewall / AV and network driver software when in fact 5 minutes of methodical probing with wireshark would have made the issue obvious.
Indeed, the basics are all relatively simple...in fact a lot of the basics are things people do intuitively...it's just they've never really been told or thought about how it would work as a generalized computing machine.
I think the problem is that often when people attempt to explain "computers" they end up explaining things about the Windows operating system like the registry and the "C drive" etc.
Of course this stuff is massively complicated and the majority of HN readers probably don't really understand the whole thing so what hope would some random person have?
If people could understand a basic turing machine type system and possibly write simple assembler to run on it then they could be told "this is all your PC, your smartphone and your iPad are just they have lots and lots of window dressing".
One of the best explanations I've seen for the question 'how does my computer get from these zeros and ones to these windows' is 4 pages in Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. (Starts at 287, all editions pagination is the same)
It's also interesting that you mention the holistic approach because this is exactly how many people view computers, in the same way they might view a mechanical device. I have seen people reason "If a reboot doesn't fix it , maybe 2 or 3 reboots in quick succession will".
It's also scary how many professional IT people seem to have a cargo cult understanding of computers. I've seen people do all kinds of crazy incantations , for example troubleshooting a network problem by re-installing OS software on multiple workstations and trying different combinations of firewall / AV and network driver software when in fact 5 minutes of methodical probing with wireshark would have made the issue obvious.