Monologue on Computer Essentials

Monologue on Computer Essentials

Today computers are the part of our everyday life. Unfortunately, people don’t usually think about: How do computers really work? I have collected some data and I am going to comment on this issue.

Firstly, let’s talk about functioning of computers. Computer components include hardware, software, input. Hardware is a general term that refers to the physical artifacts of a technology. Moreover, hardware performs all calculations and generate output. Software is a set of instructions, data or programs used to operate computers and execute specific tasks. It can be thought of as the variable part of a computer, while hardware is the invariable part.

The two main categories of software are application software and system software. An application is software that fulfills a specific need or performs tasks. System software is designed to run a computer's hardware and provides a platform for applications to run on top of.

Some computer devices can also be categorized as input devices because we use these to provide the input to the computer, some common examples of computer input devices are mouse, keyboard, microphone.

It is not surprising, that hardware and software work together. In some case, software is a head, hardware is a body. Computer cannot accomplish a task without teamwork of software and hardware. Hardware and software are able to work together because of your operating system and CPU. Your operating system acts as an interpreter between you and the central processing unit. It was made to abstract away instructions, so it would not be necessary for you to continually write code to use your hardware devices.

Also one of the most essential point is how the computer came up. The history of computers began with primitive designs in the early 19th century and went on to change the world during the 20th century. First computers took up entire rooms. By the early 20th century, computers evolved from a cumbersome and slow device to a quick and smart machine. Now they have incredible processing power. Charles Babbage is credited with inventing the computer. I personally have the modern version of computer: laptop whish is capable of fitting on one’s desktop. However, there is another option. You can purchase a PC, which can be easily upgraded with a better processor and more memory in case its too slow for you.

What if I told you, that there is one more type of computers? A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Supercomputers contain tens of thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations or computations per second. Some supercomputers can perform up to a hundred quadrillion FLOPS. What are the main differences between supercomputer and computer: Supercomputer can develop transistors and integrated circuits, Supercomputer is capable of crunching a complex problem, because of using parallel processing instead of the serial processing, which helps to  keep track of the many results, by splitting a problem into chunks.