CIS 1200 Chapter Notes - Chapter TIF: Binary Number, Central Processing Unit, Intel 4004

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Computing and Information Science
• Course: CIS 1200
• Professor: John Saville

Document Summary

Tech in focus #3: under the hood. Computers use switches to function: only understand two states: on and off, defined by 1 (on) and 0 (off), called binary language, electrical switches: devices inside the computer that are flipped between the two states. Vacuum tubes: the earliest computers used these as switches: works by allowing or blocking electrical signals, took up a lot of space, produced a lot of heat, burned out frequently. Transistors: electrical switches built out of layers of a special type of material called semiconductor. Integrated circuits: aka chips; tiny regions of semiconductor material that support a huge number of transistors. Microprocessors: chips that contain a cpu: the first complete microprocessor was the intel 4004. Base-10 number system: aka decimal notation; used to represent all numeric values you use each day using 10 digits, 0-9: break down the number into ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc, e. g.