Computers

t was probably the worst prediction in history. 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." Six decades later and—if you count smartphones—the global population of
computers has now risen to well over five billion machines!
To be fair to Watson, computers have changed enormously in that time. In the 1940s, they
were giant scientific and military behemoths commissioned by the government at a cost of
millions of dollars apiece; today, most computers are not even recognizable as such: they are
embedded in everything from microwave ovens to cellphones and digital radios. What makes
computers flexible enough to work in all these different appliances? How come they are so
phenomenally useful? And how exactly do they work? Let's take a closer look!

NASA runs some of the world's most powerful

computers—but they're just super-scaled up
versions of the one you're using right now.

What is a computer?
A computer is an electronic machine that processes
information—in other words, an information processor: it
takes in raw information (or data) at one end, stores it until
it's ready to work on it, chews and crunches it for a bit, then
spits out the results at the other end. All these processes
have a name. 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.
Computers that used to take up a
huge room now fit comfortably on
your finger!.
Imagine if a computer were a person. Suppose you have a friend who's really good at math.
She is so good that everyone she knows posts their math problems to her. Each morning, she
goes to her letterbox and finds a pile of new math problems waiting for her attention. She
piles them up on her desk until she gets around to looking at them. 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. She puts this in an envelope addressed to the person who sent her the
original problem and sticks it in her
out tray, ready to post. Then she
moves to the next letter in the pile.
You can see that your friend is
working just like a computer. Her
letterbox is her input; the pile on
her desk is her memory; her brain
is the processor that works out the
solutions to the problems; and the
out tray on her desk is her output.
Photo: Once you understand that computers are about input, memory, processing, and
output, all the junk on your desk makes a lot more sense:
A computer works by combining input, storage, processing, and output. All the main parts of a
computer system are involved in one of these four processes.
 Input: Your keyboard and mouse, for example, are just input units—ways of getting
information into your computer that it can process. If you use a microphone and voice
recognition software, that's another form of input.
 Memory/storage: Your computer probably stores all your documents and files on
a hard drive: a huge magnetic memory. But smaller, computer-based devices
like digital cameras and cellphones use other kinds of storage such as flash
memory cards.
 Processing: Your computer's processor (sometimes known as the central processing
unit) is a microchip buried deep inside. It works amazingly hard and gets incredibly hot
in the process. That's why your computer has a little fan blowing away—to stop its
brain from overheating!
 Output: Your computer probably has an LCD screen capable of displaying high-
resolution (very detailed) graphics, and probably also stereo loudspeakers. You may
have an inkjet printer on your desk too to make a more permanent form of output.

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. Today, computers work on a much wider variety
of problems—but they are all still, essentially, calculations. Everything a computer does, from
helping you to edit a photograph you've taken with a digital camera to displaying a web page,
involves manipulating numbers in one way or another.

Photo: Calculators and computers are very similar, because both work
by processing numbers. However, a calculator simply figures out the
results of calculations; and that's all it ever does. A computer stores
complex sets of instructions called programs and uses them to do
much more interesting things.

Suppose you're looking at a digital photo you just taken in a paint or photo-editing program
and you decide you want a mirror image of it (in other words, flip it from left to right). You
probably know that the photo is made up of millions of individual pixels (colored squares)
arranged in a grid pattern. The computer stores each pixel as a number, so taking a digital
photo is really like an instant, orderly exercise in painting by numbers! To flip a digital photo,
the computer simply reverses the sequence of numbers so they run from right to left instead
of left to right. Or suppose you want to make the photograph brighter. All you have to do is
slide the little "brightness" icon. The computer then works through all the pixels, increasing
the brightness value for each one by, say, 10 percent to make the entire image brighter. So,
once again, the problem boils down to numbers and calculations.
What makes a computer different from a calculator is that it can work all by itself. You just
give it your instructions (called a program) and off it goes, performing a long and complex
series of operations all by itself. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, if you wanted a home computer
to do almost anything at all, you had to write your own little program to do it. For example,
before you could write a letter on a computer, you had to write a program that would read the
letters you typed on the keyboard, store them in the memory, and display them on the
screen. Writing the program usually took more time than doing whatever it was that you had
originally wanted to do (writing the letter). Pretty soon, people started selling programs like
word processors to save you the need to write programs yourself.
Today, most computer users rely on prewritten programs like Microsoft Word and Excel or
download apps for their tablets and smartphones without caring much how they got there.
(Apps, if you ever wondered, are just very neatly packaged computer programs.) Hardly
anyone writes programs any more, which is a shame, because it's great fun and a really
useful skill. Most people see their computers as tools that help them do jobs, rather than
complex electronic machines they have to pre-program. Some would say that's just as well,
because most of us have better things to do than computer programming. Then again, if we
all rely on computer programs and apps, someone has to write them, and those skills need to
survive. Thankfully, there's been a recent resurgence of interest in computer programming.
"Coding" (an informal name for programming, since programs are sometimes referred to as
"code") is being taught in schools again with the help of easy-to-use programming languages
like Scratch. There's a growing hobbyist movement, linked to build-it yourself gadgets like the
Raspberry Pi and Arduino. And Code Clubs, where volunteers teach kids programming, are
springing up all over the world.
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. In other words, although we don't really think of it
this way, the computer can be reprogrammed as many times as you like. This is why
programs are also called software. They're "soft" in the sense that they are not fixed: they can
be changed easily. 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. The hardware is what makes your computer powerful; the ability
to run different software is what makes it flexible. 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!

Photo: Hardware—the physical part of your

computer—is more or less fixed in the factory,
although some bits of it (such as drives and
memory chips) are fairly easy to remove,
replace, and expand.

What is an operating system?

Suppose you're back in the late 1970s, before off-the-shelf computer programs have really
been invented. You want to program your computer to work as a word processor so you can
bash out your first novel—which is relatively easy but will take you a few days of work. A few
weeks later, you tire of writing things and decide to reprogram your machine so it'll play
chess. Later still, you decide to program it to store your photo collection. Every one of these
programs does different things, but they also do quite a lot of similar things too. For example,
they all need to be able to read the keys pressed down on the keyboard, store things in
memory and retrieve them, and display characters (or pictures) on the screen. 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. That's a bit of a programming chore, so why not
simply collect together all the bits of program that do these basic functions and reuse them
each time?

Photo: Typical computer architecture: You can think of a

computer as a series of layers, with the hardware at the bottom,
the BIOS connecting the hardware to the operating system, and
the applications you actually use (such as word processors, Web
browsers, and so on) running on top of that. Each of these layers
is relatively independent so, for example, the same Windows
operating system might run on laptops running a different BIOS,
while a computer running Windows (or another operating
system) can run any number of different applications.

That's the basic idea behind an operating system: it's the core software in a computer that
(essentially) controls the basic chores of input, output, storage, and processing. 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. So a word processor and a chess game are
two different applications that both rely on the operating system to carry out their basic input,
output, and so on. The operating system relies on an even more fundamental piece of
programming called the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), which is the link between the
operating system software and the hardware. Unlike the operating system, which is the same
from one computer to another, the BIOS does vary from machine to machine according to the
precise hardware configuration and is usually written by the hardware manufacturer. The BIOS
is not, strictly speaking, software: it's a program semi-permanently stored into one of the
computer's main chips, so it's known as firmware (it is usually designed so it can be updated
occasionally, however).
Operating systems have another big benefit. Back in the 1970s (and early 1980s), virtually all
computers were maddeningly different. They all ran in their own, idiosyncratic ways with fairly
unique hardware (different processor chips, memory addresses, screen sizes and all the rest).
Programs written for one machine (such as an Apple) usually wouldn't run on any other
machine (such as an IBM) without quite extensive conversion. That was a big problem for
programmers because it meant they had to rewrite all their programs each time they wanted
to run them on different machines. How did operating systems help? If you have a standard
operating system and you tweak it so it will work on any machine, all you have to do is write
applications that work on the operating system. Then any application will work on any
machine. The operating system that definitively made this breakthrough was, of course,
Microsoft Windows, spawned by Bill Gates.

What's inside your

PC?
Photo: Inside the case of a typical PC showing four key areas of components, described below.
Photo by ArmadniGeneral courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, published under a Creative
Commons License.

It all looks pretty scary and confusing inside a typical PC: circuit boards like little "cities" with
the chips for buildings, rainbow tangles of wires running between them, and goodness knows
what else. But work through the components slowly and logically and it all starts to make
sense. Most of what you can see divides into four broad areas, which I've outlined in green,
blue, red, and orange on this photo.
Power supply (green)
Based on a transformer, this converts your domestic or office power voltage (say 230/120
volts AC) into the much lower DC voltage that electronic components need (a typical hard
drive might need just 5–12V). There's usually a large cooling fan on the outside of the
computer case near the power socket (or a much smaller fan on a laptop, usually on one
side). In this machine, there are two external fans (colored green and blue) just to the left,
cooling both the power supply and the mainboard.
Mainboard (blue)
As its name suggests, this is the brain of a computer—where the real work gets done. The
main processor (central processing unit) is easy to spot because there's typically a large fan
sitting right on top of it to cool it down. In this photo, the processor is directly underneath the
black fan with the red central spindle. Exactly what's on the mainboard varies from machine
to machine. As well as the processor, there's the BIOS, memory chips, expansion slots for
extra memory, flexible ribbon connections to the other circuit boards, IDE (Integrated Drive
Electronics) connections to the hard drives and CD/DVD drives, and serial or parallel
connections to things like the USB ports, and other ports on the computer case
(often soldered onto the mainboard, especially in a laptop).
Other circuit boards (red)
Although the mainboard can (theoretically) contain all the chips a computer needs, it's quite
common for PCs to have three other separate circuit boards: one to manage networking, one
to process graphics, and one to deal with sound.
 The networking card (also called a Network Interface Card/Controller, NIC, or network
adapter), as its name suggests, connects your computer to other machines (or things
like printers) in a computer network (typically either a local area network, LAN, in a
home or office or the wider Internet) using a system called Ethernet. Older computers
may have a separate wireless (WLAN) card for linking to Wi-Fi; newer ones tend to have
a single networking card that handles both Ethernet and Wi-Fi. Some computers have
chips that do all their networking on the motherboard.
 The graphics card (also called the video card or display adapter) is the part of a
computer that handles everything to do with the display. Why isn't that done by the
central processing unit? In some machines, it can be, but that tends to slows down both
 the main processing of the machine and the graphics. Self-contained graphics cards
date from the very first IBM PC, which had a standalone display adapter way back in
1981; powerful, modern-style graphics cards for 3D, high-resolution, full-color gaming
rolled out from the mid-1990s, pioneered by companies such as Nvidia and ATI.
 The sound card is another self-contained circuit board based around digital-to-
analog and analog-to-digital converters: it turns the digital (numeric) information the
central processing unit deals with into analog (constantly varying) signals that can
power loudspeakers; and converts the analog signals coming in from a microphone into
digital signals the CPU can understand. As with networking and graphics, sound cards
or sound chips can be integrated into the motherboard.
Drives (orange)
PCs typically have one, two, or three hard drives plus a CD/DVD reader/writer. Although some
machines have only one hard drive and a single combined CD/DVD drive, most have a couple
of empty expansion slots for extra drives.
PC makers tend to design and build their own motherboards, but most of the components
they use are off-the-shelf and modular. So, for example, your Lenovo PC or Asus laptop might
have a Toshiba hard drive, an Nvidia graphics card, a Realtek sound card, and so on. Even on
the motherboard, the components may be modular and plug-and-play: "Intel Inside" means
you've got an Intel processor sitting under the fan. All this means it's very easy to replace or
upgrade the parts of a PC either when they wear out or grow obsolete; you don't have to
throw the whole machine out. If you're interested in tinkering, there are a couple of good
books listed in the "How computers work" section below that will walk you through the
process.
External connectors ("ports")
You can connect your computer to peripherals (external gadgets like inkjet printers, webcams,
and flash memory sticks) either with a wired connection (a serial or parallel cable) or with
wireless (typically Bluetooth or Wi-Fi). Years ago, computers and peripherals used a mind-
boggling collection of different connectors for linking to one another. These days, virtually all
PCs use a standard way of connecting together called USB (universal serial bus). USB is
meant to be "plug and play": whatever you plug into your computer works more or less out of
the box, though you might have to wait while your machine downloads a driver (an extra
piece of software that tells it how to use that
particular piece of hardware).
Photo: USB ports on computers are very robust, but
they do break from time to time, especially after
years of use. If you have a laptop with a PCMCIA
slot (Personal Computer Memory Card International
Association), you can simply slide in a USB adapter
card like this to create two brand new USB ports (or
to add two more ports if you're running short).

Apart from making it easy to swap data, USB also provides power to things like external hard
drives. The two outer pins of a USB plug are +5 volt and ground power connectors, while the
inner pins carry the data. When you plug your phone into a USB port on a bus or a train,
you're just using the outer pins to charge the battery.
USB gives you much more connectivity than old-fashioned serial computer ports. It's designed
so you can connect it in many different ways, either with one peripheral plugged into each of
your USB sockets or using USB hubs (where one USB plug gives you access to a whole series
of USB sockets, which can themselves have more hubs and sockets plugged into them). In
theory, you can have 127 different USB devices attached to one computer.