HOW COMPUTERS WORK:

WHAT MAKES A COMPUTER, A COMPUTER?

May-Li Khoe – designer and inventor

- Designed for apple once

NAT –one of the original designers of Xbox and now works on Virtual Reality

As humans, we’ve always built tools to help us solve problems, tools like a wheel barrow, a hammer, or a printing press,
or tractor trailer. All these inventions help us with manual work, over time people began to wonder if a machine could
be design and built to help us with the thinking work, we do, like solving equations, or tracking the stars in the sky.
Rather than moving or manipulating physical things like dirt and stone. These machines would need to be designed to
manipulate information.

As the pioneers of computer science explored how to design a thinking machine, they realized that it had to perform
four (4) different tasks.

1. Take INPUT
2. Store information; STORAGE
3. Process it. PROCESSING
4. OUTPUT the result.

Yung nasa taas ay “4 things common to all computers”, that’s what makes a computer, a computer.

The earliest computers were made out of wood and metal with mechanical levers and gears, by the 2oth century though
computers started using electrical components, these early computers were really large and really slow, a computer the
size of a room might take hours just to do a basic math problem.

These machines are things of gleaming vary colored metal and numerous flashing lights.

Computers started out as basic calculators, which was also really awesome at that time. And they were only
manipulating numbers back then, but now we can use them to talk to each other, we can use them to play games,
control robots, and do any crazy thing that you could probably imagine.

Modern computers look nothing like those clunky old machines but they still do these 4 things.

INPUT – input is the stuff that the world does or that you do that makes the computers do stuff.

- You can tell a computer what to do with a keyboard, what to do with a mouse, the microphone, the camera, and
now you’re wearing a computer on your risk, it can listen to your heartbeat or your car and a touch screen can
actually sense your finger and it takes that as input on what’s doing

STORAGE & PROCESSING – all these different inputs give a computer information which is then stored in memory

- A computer’s processor takes information from memory, it manipulates it or changes it using algorithm (a series
of commands) and then it sends the processed information back to be stored in memory again, this continues
until the processed information is ready to be output.

OUTPUT – how a computer outputs information depends on the computers designed to do.
 - A computer display could show text, photos, video, or interactive games, even a virtual reality, the output of a
computer may even include signals to control a robot. And what computers connect over the internet, the
output from a computer becomes an input to another, and vice versa.

The computers we used today looks really different from the earliest thinking machines, and who knows what the
computers of tomorrow will be like.

All computers do the same 4 things.

They take in information

They store it as data

They process it

And then, they output the results.

DATA & BINARY

Limor Fried – founded Adafruit Industries, designs circuits for fashion, music, and technology.

Federico Gomez Suarez – software developer at Microsoft Hack For Good.

Computers work on ones and zeroes. These “Ones & Zeroes” do play a big role in how computers work on the inside.

Inside a computer are electric wires and circuits – carry all the information in a computer.

How Do You Store or Represent Information Using Electricity?

If you have a single wire with electricity flowing through it, the signal could be ON or OFF. With one wire you can
represent a YES or a NO, TRUE or FALSE, a 1 or a 0, or anything else with only two options. This on-off state of a single
wire is called a bit – the smallest piece of information a computer can store.

If you use more wires, you get more bits. More ones and zeroes, with more bits you can represent more complex
information. The more wires you use the larger the numbers you can store. 8 wires can store numbers from 0 and 255,
that’s 8 ones. While 32 wires store from 0 to over 4 billion. In this, it is important that you only use the Binary Number
System (1, 0) in representing any number.

How about Text, Images and Sound?

These things can also be represented with numbers.

– All the letters in the alphabet, could be assigned a number for each letter, A is 1, B is 2, C is 3, and so on.
There fore through this, you can then represent any word or paragraph as a sequence of numbers, and
these numbers can be stored with on and off electrical signals.
– Every word on every webpage or a phone are represented using a system like this.

IMAGES IN BINARY

– Considering photos, videos, and graphics, all of these images are made out of tiny dots called pixels. And
each pixel has a color, each of the colors can be represented with numbers. The typical image has millions of
these pixels. In a typical video, shows 30 images per second plus 3 billion pixels per minute.

SOUND IN BINARY

– every sound is basically a series of vibrations in the air. Vibrations can be represented graphically as a wave
form, any point on this waveform can be represented by a number. Through this, any sound can be broken
down into a series of numbers. For high quality sounds, 32-bit audio is chosen over 8-bit audio. More bits mean
a higher range of numbers

When you use a computer to write code or make your own app, you’re not dealing directly with this ones and zeroes.
But you will be dealing with images, sound, or videos. So, if you want to understand how computers work on the inside,
it all comes down to these simple ones and zeroes, and the electrical signals in the circuits behind them, they are the
backbone of how all computers input, store, process, and output information

CIRCUITS & LOGIC

According to Limor, “Circuitry can be an art form. Like if I have creative idea, I can get that creative idea out using
circuits. So, if you have ideas, you can use technology to make those ideas come to life.”

Every input or output of a computer is effectively a type of information, which can be represented by on or off electrical
signals or ones and zeroes. In order to process the information that comes in as input, and to make the information that
is output. A computer needs to modify and combine the input signals. To do this, a computer uses millions of teeny
electronic components, which come together to form circuits.

Circuits can modify and process information that’s represented in ones and zeros.