CIS 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Computer Hardware, Input Device, Peripheral

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Computing and Information Science
• Course: CIS 1000
• Professor: Jing Yu Zhu

Document Summary

A computer is a data processing device that performs four major functions: input, processing, output, and storage. Modern computers consist of multiple pieces of hardware and software working together, each of which is responsible for a particular task. This unit will focus on the hardware, the physical pieces of your computer, some of the most important of which you may never have seen. Inside your computer tower, or just underneath the keyboard of your laptop, is your motherboard, cpu, ram, graphics card, hard drives, optical drive, and ports to connect peripherals. All of these pieces of hardware work together to provide you with your computer experience. Computers work in the language of binary, which consists completely of 0s and 1s. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit, and 8 bits is called a byte. For instance, the word hello can be represented as: 01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 (in ascii). Identify and explain the components of the system unit.