How your computer does what it does
A computer works in “mysterious ways”. And I’m on a mission to figure out how it works. But wait. What is a computer? Going by the name, it’s anything that computes. Right? I mean the term computer was first used to mean a person that computes(calculates). And while the anything that computes is still a computer, we have come to restrict the definition to anything that uses electricity to take input, process it and place the output in either a permanent or a temporary store.
So laptops, desktops, phones, some calculators, smart watches, game consoles(😋) and web servers are all examples of a computer. Great! Now that that’s out of the way, we can figure out how it works.
First a computer takes input. Where does this input come from? It could be from the user: A keyboard stroke, a touchscreen gesture or even a voice command — Hey Siri, how does a computer work?. Input could also come from the storage of a computer: The result of a previous operation or a downloaded program. For the computer to make sense of this input it needs to be converted to a format it can understand; a bit.
A bit is short for binary digit and it is either a zero or a one. On or off. A combination of these bits conveys information. For instance, the ANSI decided that the bit combination 0100 0001 should represent the capital alphabet ‘A’. And so the input of 0100 0001 stands for ‘A’ to the computer. Other values are encoded in different combinations of bits, but the exact combination is out of the scope of this article.
This information is then processed by the computer. And this is where we get the term computer. Processing is just a fancy term for running multiple calculations on the data. The exact order and types of calculations vary based the type of processor and what the computer is trying to achieve.
Finally the result of the processing is outputted to a storage point. Also in bits. 8 of these bits give a combination of 256 different possible outcomes, which means 8 bits is able to represent 256 different things. 256 different colors, 256 different characters or 256 different numbers. So 8 bits became the base unit for storage. And the term byte was coined for it. So that’s how we get our storage. In kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes…. You get the point.
After storage, the stored result can be reused as input for another operation or presented to us in a form we can understand. Either through a pixel on the screen or a sound from the speakers or a vibration on your phone or any other medium.
And this is how the computer works. Join me next time as I talk about the different parts in detail. Sayonara!
