[ccrush]

I had the same questions when I was about your age and found a lot of intersting answers in the Linux source code. of course it was a lot simpler back then. what really got me going was the osdev community (much smaller back then) and Intels system architecture documentation. iirc part 3a or 3b was where the good stuff is. it tells you a lot less about how things are and a lot more about how things could be. you also get to learn plenty of fun things in OSDEV too like how 32bit processors did 36bit addressing with PAE or how 64bit processors did 52bit addressing to squeeze money out of people. how computers start in 16bit mode and you have to learn systems level assembly code gymnastics to make it to long mode, why there's an 8bit mode around, and more. if you liked learning about loading binaries, you'll love how many surprises still exist. like 64bit mode still including memory segmentation but forcing it to flat mapping for lonh mode