Introduction
Computers like cell phones, digital assistants, gaming devices, tablets, and even things like modern cars and drones have enormous power to do work. Computers enable you to do things you couldn't do without these amazing machines.
You probably can guess that computers are complex. Even the most complex things in the world, however, when broken down into their simpler parts can be better understood. That's what this module explores. You're going to learn the basic parts of computers with the goal of better understanding how they work. You'll then examine "the cloud" and how that works.
Behold, the Hardware
When you turn on your mobile phone, an automobile, or even a modern oven or refrigerator, you're powering up a powerful computer. In what follows, you're going to cover the parts that make up computers.
You may be aware that computers need more than the parts you can touch, the hardware. They run something called software that tells the hardware what to do. While both have a role to play, computers really start with the hardware.
In this module, you'll explore the following articles:
- What makes up a computer
- What the processor does
- How random access memory works and functions
- The types of storage in a computer
- Data centers and cloud computing
- How computers give people access to systems and resources in those systems
Power up
So, keep your computer charged or plugged in and we'll learn a bit more about how it all works. You're about to go from being a user of your hardware to being, well, a user who knows these machines as an "insider."