Introduction to Computer Applications Computer Hardware and Software

Introduction to Computer Applications Computer Hardware and Software

Outline • Computer Hardware • Computer Software • Internet

Computer hardware

Computer hardware • “Computer hardware (or simply hardware in computing contexts) is the collection of physical elements that constitutes a computer system. ” • “Computer hardware is the physical parts or components of a computer, such as the monitor, keyboard, computer data storage, hard disk drive (HDD), graphic cards, sound cards, memory (RAM), motherboard, and so on, all of which are tangible physical objects. ” • Source: Wikipedia

Computer systems • Manufactures • Hewlett-Packard (HP) • Dell • Toshiba • Acer

Intel Microprocessors • Manufacturing processors since 1971 • 32 -bit / 64 -bit processors • Number of calculations per second that can be performed • Clock Rate (GHz) • Speed at which microprocessor executes instructions • 1. 8 GHz processor perform 1, 800, 000 clock cycles per second

Computer software • “Computer software, or simply software, is that part of a computer system that consists of encoded information or computer instructions, in contrast to the physical hardware from which the system is built. ” • Source: Wikipedia

Web search engine • Web search engines work by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible • Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document • Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query • Web Search Engine Timeline