I, unfortunately, missed the first class of this week since I had a high fever. However, luckily, my presentation group is very inclusive and my group mates told me what happened in this class. We finally started to learn about what is a computer, its history, computing system and the model of the computing system.
I found that I already set up my blog with the category, menus, and posts attached to the categories. I also entered my information in the Student Information database on the class website. I then took a careful look at this class’s slides to see the main points of the class and watched the video that I missed.
What is a Computer? Who Invented the First Computer?
A computer includes the computing system, hardware and software. The computing system means that the hardware, the software and the data interact to solve problems. The hardware is the physical elements of a computing system while the software is the programs that provide instructions for the computer to execute. For example, a keyboard is hardware while an app is software. The other video showed me the history of computers. The conclusion is that there is not a single person who invented the first computer but many people keep influencing each other to keel developing computers. Even though computers are very prevalent in our daily life, I never really thought about what is a computer or the history of it. After learning the definition of a computer, I can have a look at my computer and see which part of it is hardware, which part is software and how they interact with data to solve problems and to be a computer.
Layers of Computing System
As mentioned above, the computing system means that the hardware, the software and the date interact to solve problems. In addition, different layers of the computing system work together to solve problems. The innermost layer is the information layer. The information on a computer is represented using a binary number system. The next layer is the hardware which is the physical elements of a computer. The third layer is the programming layer which deals with software. The fourth layer is the operating system which helps us interact with the computer system and helps hardware, software and data interact. The fifth layer is the application layer which uses the computer to solve specific real word problems such as playing a game. The outermost layer is the communication layer which helps us to communicate with other computers. For example, the communication layer allows us to use the social media.
The General Model of All Computing Systems
The model of all computing systems explains how computing systems work in very simple three words which are “input—process—output”. A computer receives an input, processes the information and then performs an output. For example, when you text your friend, you type the text and press “send” which is the input. Then the phone processes the information. Finally, your friend receives the text which is the output.
Computing Hardware——Presentation
Hardware is part of a computing system. We then learn further about it by doing a presentation about hardware using real-life examples. Our group introduced the output devices. This presentation was my first presentation this semester with new classmates and I was very excited about it. We needed to introduce eight devices and there are four people in our group so each person would introduce two devices. Mine are braille displays and projectors. We read the presentation requirements and rubric together very carefully. We controlled our presentation time carefully within 8 minutes and our information resources were all from reliable websites. We made our slides using bullet points together on Zoho. As we weren’t quite sure about the citation format, we used the MLA format to make our citation. I’m very happy that our group was very cohesive and that my group mates were very cooperative and reliable. I also learned a lot about other types of hardware devices from other groups’ presentation.
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