How a Computor works / The History
By Anthea Tien, 7T3 TVA
Hard Drive (HDD) / SSD
Hard Drives, or HDDs, are used to read and write Hard Disks. They are used for storage on the computer. "Any kind of solid-state storage device that appears to the system as a disk drive. SSDs are more expensive that the same capacity of magnetic disk but have much shorter access time. " - FOLDOC, Computing Dictionary.
Optical Drive
An Optical Drive is a Hard Drive, it reads and/or writes 'Optical Media' , e.g. Compact Discs, DVDs and / or Blu-Ray disks or future media that uses light from a red laser which allows it to read rotating disks.
Monitors
Montors show in colours or black and white but only works if a Cathode-ray tube and other electronics are connected to the computer video's output.
CPU
Known as a Central Processing Unit, the CPU controls the other parts. Designs vary widely but the CPU generally consists of the control unit, the arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), registers, temporary buffers and various other logic. The control unit collects instructions from its memory and decodes them to send signals to other parts of the computer.
RAM
RAM is an acronym for random-access memory. The purpose of RAM is to read to and write to another part. If the computer is turned off, RAM is erased.
Mother Board
In a personal computer, the motherboard contains the bus, the microprocessor, and integrated circuits used for controlling any built-in peripherals such as the keyboard, text and graphics display, serial ports and parallel ports, joystick, and mouse interfaces.
-FOLDOC Computing Dictionary
Input
Data transferred from the outside world into the computer system via some kind of input device.
Opposite: Output
Output
Data transferred from the outside world into the computer system via some kind of output device
Opposite: Input