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You either use or are about to purchase one of the most advanced pieces of technology ever made available to humans. Why not be a sport about it and take a few moments to not avoid some of the more technical mumbo jumbo surrounding that technology? Don’t fret: I’ll be gentle.

What a computer does

Computers can do anything and try to do just about everything. At their core, however, computers are simple gizmos. Their advantage is that computers have oodles of potential.

A computer takes input, processes it, and then generates output. That’s kind of how a baby works, though to keep you from being utterly befuddled, you can refer to Figure 1-2, which completely illustrates that basic computer concept.

Figure 1-2: What a computer does at its simplest level.

The “input goes into the computer, gets processed, and then produces output” equation is the foundation of these three primary computer concepts:

✔ I/O

✔ Processing

✔ Storage

I/O: I/O stands for input and output. It’s pronounced “I owe,” like Io, the third-largest moon of Jupiter. I/O is pretty much the only thing a computer does: It receives input from devices – the keyboard, mouse, Internet. It generates output, displayed on the screen, printed, or sent back to the Internet. That’s I/O.

Processing: What the computer does between input and output is processing. It’s what happens to the input to make the output significant. Otherwise, the computer would simply be a tube, and computer science would be the same as plumbing.

Processing is handled inside the computer by a gizmo known as (logically enough) a processor. See Chapter 5 for more information on the processor.

Storage: The final part of the basic computer equation is storage, which is where the processing takes place. Two types of storage are used: temporary and long-term. Temporary storage is the computer memory, or RAM. Long-term storage is provided by the computer’s storage media.

Computer memory is covered in Chapter 6. Long-term storage is covered in Chapter 7.

Hardware and software

The computer universe is divided into two parts. One part is hardware. The other part is software.

Hardware is the physical part of a computer: anything you can touch and anything you can see – or anything that smells like burning plastic. The computer console, the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse. All that physical stuff is hardware.

Software is the computer’s brain. Software tells the hardware what to do.

In a way, it helps to think of hardware and software as a symphony orchestra. For hardware, you have the musicians and their instruments. Their software is the music. As with a computer, the music (software) tells the musicians and their instruments (hardware) what to do.

Without software, hardware just sits around and looks pretty. It can’t do anything because it has no instructions and nothing telling it what to do next. And, like a symphony orchestra without music, that can be an expensive waste of time, especially at union scale.

To make the computer system work, software must be in charge. In fact, software determines your computer’s personality and potential.

✔ If you can throw it out a window, it’s hardware.

✔ If you can throw it out a window and it comes back, it’s a cat.

✔ Computer software includes all the programs you use on the PC.

✔ The most important piece of software is the computer’s operating system. That’s the main program in charge of everything.

✔ Chapter 13 covers Windows, which is the PC’s least popular yet most common operating system.

✔ Chapter 14 covers computer programs, also considered software.