How Do The Computer Work ["STARWARS"]

How Do The Computer Work

- Back in the 1940s, Thomas Watson, boss of the giant IBM Corporation, reputedly forecast that the world would need no more than "about five computers." (Passive)

- In the 1940 they were giant scientific and military behemoths commissioned by the government at
a cost of millions of dollars apiece (Active)

- What makes computers flexible enough to work in all these different appliances? (Active)

What is a Computer

- Taking in information is called input storing information is better known as memory (or storage), chewing information is also known as processing, and spitting out results is called output ( Active )

- She piles them up on her desk until she gets around to looking at them ( Passive )

- Each afternoon, she takes a letter off the top of the pile, studies the problem, works out the solution, and scribbles the answer on the back ( Passive )

- You can see that your friend is working just like a computer ( Active )

What is a computer Program

- As you can read in our long article on computer history, the first computers were
gigantic calculating machines and all they ever really did was "crunch numbers":
solve lengthy, difficult, or tedious mathematical problems ( Active )

- Today, computers work on a much wider variety of problems but they are all still ( Active )

What's the difference between hardware and software?

- The beauty of a computer is that it can run a word-processing program one minute and then a photo-editing program five seconds later ( Active )

- They're "soft" in the sense that they are not fixed: they can be changed easily ( Active )

- By contrast, a computer's hardware— the bits and pieces from which it is made (and the peripherals, like the mouse and printer, you plug into it)—is pretty much fixed when you buy it off the shelf. 

( Passive )

- That computers can do so many different jobs is what makes them so useful—and that's why millions of us can no longer live without them! ( Active ) 

What is an operating system?

- Suppose you're back in the late 1970s, before off-the-shelf computer programs have really been invented ( Active )

- A few weeks later, you tire of writing things and decide to reprogram your machine so it'll play chess ( Active )

- If you were writing lots of different programs, you'd find yourself writing the same bits of programming to do these same basic operations every time  ( Active )

- You can think of an operating system as the "foundations" of the software in a computer that other programs (called applications) are built on top of ( Active )

-  The operating system relies on an even more fundamental piece of programming called the BIOS 

( Active )

- They all ran in their own idiosyncratic ways with fairly unique hardware (different processor chips, memory addresses, screen sizes and all the rest ( Active ) 

- Then any application will work on any machine. ( Active )

- The operating system that definitively made this breakthrough was, of course, Microsoft Windows, written by Bill Gate ( Active )