How many times you heard about things that you couldn’t understand about your computer? Don’t lie; I’m sure that this happened a few times. CPU, RAM, Hard drive, FPU, NTFS?? WTF? What are these? For a long time these things were a mystery to me too but now is time to stop gossip and try to explain a bit of these.
Well a computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. Sounds ugly. But it’s not. We all know that the computer is a machine. And what’s about those instructions? Well it’s not too difficult. It’s something like how you learned to add or multiply. Someone gives you a few numbers and you with the help of an algorithm you add them. Simple heh? Not really… The computer does more but everything’s is based on the instructions stored in a memory.
The first computers were huuuge, size of a room consumed a lot of power and they had poor processing power. Better sad they were almost useless. But time passed and they invented the integrated circuits, so now we store our computer in a small place, and don’t worry about the electric bill. When I speak about computer you probably see the classic image of a PC but there are computers in digital camera or in toys. Even the traffic lights are controlled by a computer.
I know that you aren’t still cleared what are all those terms like RAM or CPU but I will return to explain those too.
