Computer Basics

Copyright 2003 Janna B. Gallaher

The Personal Computer

t The

personal computer was made possible by the invention of solid state electronics and specifically the integrated circuit. t The first microprocessors were made in the late 1960s and were very simple in structure

PC Architecture
Sound Video Ram Video Processor

Motherboard
CPU

Power On Reset

Monitor

BIOS Cache Memory DRAM 64mB 1GB

Local Bus 64-bit data, 32-bit address, 133 mhz Keyboard Bridge Bridge LAN Bridge

EISA Bus CD ROM Mouse USB

Ethernet

PCI Bus

Floppy Disk

Hard Disk

PC Motherboard
t Gigybyte GA-71XE

motherboard

Parallel and Serial Ports

Keyboard and Mouse connectors

Microprocessor ISA Expansion Slots AGP Video Connector

BIOS

RAM Memory Slots

Floppy Disk Connector PCI Expansion Slots Battery

Hard Disk Drive Connectors

PC Motherboard Block Diagram

t Gigabyte

GA-72XE motherboard block diagram (from the owners

manual)

The Microprocessor
t Block

diagram of an Intel 8086 microprocessor

Serial I/O Control

Interrupt Control

8-bit Internal Data Bus Register Array

Accumulator Temp. Register Flag Flip-flops Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU)

B Reg D Reg

C Reg E Reg L Reg

Address Data Buffer

Timing and Control

Instruction Decoder and Machine Cycle Encoding

H
Instruction Register

Reg

Stack Pointer Prog. Counter

Address Buffer

Inc/Dec Address

The Microprocessor (continued)

t Block

diagram of the Intel Itanium processor which is one of the newer microprocessors available

Diagram courtesy Intel Corp

Software
t

There are 3 levels of software required to do something on a PC

t The

BIOS t The Operating System t Applications

RAM Memory Programs Stored on Disk Application: Word Processor

BIOS
Used during boot process

Operating System
Manages computer operation

Application: Photo Editor Application: Database Application: HTML Editor

Software
t BIOS

level program on the PC t BIOS is an acronym for: Basic Input/Output System t It is a program that is stored in Read-Only-Memory on the motherboard t It is a program that is unique to each motherboard model and provides disk drive configuration information for the operating system along with the system time, security access, and other low-level settings. t The BIOS is executed during the boot process

t Lowest

BIOS Chip

The Operating System Software

t Operating System

operating system is the software that has the job of managing all of the tasks that a computer is asked to do t It performs file management and it writes to and reads from the disk t It loads and executes application programs t Manages how to use all of the peripheral devices t Receives commands from the keyboard and outputs data to the monitor t Two popular operating systems for the PC are Windows and Linux although there are others

t The

are programs that you run to perform tasks on the computer t Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Access, Visual Studio, MathCad, AutoCad, Photoshop, and Oracle are just a few of thousands of programs t These programs must be written using a programming language that will convert an idea into instructions that a computer can execute

t Applications

Application Programs

Programming Languages
t t

Programming languages allow us to convert ideas into computer code The computer can only understand sequences of 1s and 0s and humans are used to conversing in English or some other language A programming language provides the means of converting English sentences into machine code There are many programming languages and each one has its advantages and disadvantages One good general purpose programming language is C

Writing Programs
t Writing
t The

programs involves knowing several things:

application what it is that you want to do on the computer t The operating system how does the program interface with the computer t The language syntax what it takes to write programs t A program development environment a compiler and debugger or other program development tools t Other tools such as mathematics, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence algorithms, signal processing techniques, etc.

t Engineering

the solution must be done first before any code is

written