Can you imagine a world without computers? Many of us play games on computers. We need them to send email or instant messages to our friends. We use them for our homework, to type papers, and to look for information. We listen to music, watch movie DVDs, and keep photographs of our family and friends on computers. Many people shop for things using a computer. Some of us even write books on …
The word computer comes from compute, which means to add or subtract, like arithmetic. On the most basic level, a computer is a machine that computes. However, we now know that a computer can do so much more. Everything that a computer does has to do with numbers. It transforms numbers into words, into pictures, and into sounds. It does these things much faster than a person ever could, even thou…
Did you know that the first computers were invented in the 1600s, and that they were not run by electricity? A French mathematician named Blaise Pascal invented the first machine that could perform addition and subtraction, and it used wheels and gears to do so. Prior to the mechanical ability to perform addition and subtraction, much of the world used the abacus. There are regions aro…
Through the first half of the 1900s, computers continued to get better with the use of electricity. As electricity took the place of wheels and gears, computers eventually became faster, cheaper, and smaller. Yet the first electric computers could be the size of a small house! American mathematician John V. Atanasoff developed the first electronic computer in 1939. By the 1950s, transistors…
The age of the personal computer began in the mid-1970s, with the development of the integrated circuit, or silicon chip. They could do what previously needed hundreds of transistors. The silicon chips continue to get smaller. As technology advanced, many companies replaced mainframe computers with networked personal computers. Most of the computers we now use are personal comput…
Two companies that got their start in the mid-1970s continue to be leaders in the computer industry today. In 1975, two friends named Bill Gates and Paul Allen started a company called Microsoft. It later developed a system called Windows, which lets the computer do many different things at once. A computer that uses the Microsoft Windows technology is called a PC (personal computer). The e…
When we talk about computer hardware, we do not mean a hammer and nails or other things you can buy at a hardware store. Hardware is the computer itself and everything that is inside of it. The chips, the keyboard, and the other parts are all considered hardware. Software refers to the various programs that the computer can run and the things that it can do. You must have software programs …
Computers have many parts. Some of them we can see. Some of them are inside the computer, so we can't see them without taking the computer apart. Some parts are so small that we might not be able to see them at all. The hard drive is where the computer stores most of its information. It lets the programs run and saves everything we want to keep in our computer, including all the song…
Computers have gotten smaller, most of them have gotten less expensive, and almost all of them are faster with more memory. Every year, computers keep getting better and better. Computers still use the same language, the binary code of 0s and 1s. They read these through electricity. A 1 means the electronic pulse is on. A 0 means it is off. It is the complex combination of pulses that are o…
bit (bit): a single binary digit, a 1 or 0 byte (bite): a group of binary digits that a computer transforms into a number, letter, or something else CD-ROM (SEE-DEE ROM): a computer drive that plays compact discs and has read-only memory central processing unit (SEN-truhl PROSS-ess-ing YOO-nit): the processor or part of the computer that processes software or information; sometimes called CPU cra…