How Computers Work?

You may have heard that all computers primarily do the same thing:

Input -> Process -> Output

Some even same computers are just glorified calculators and if we see the history of computers we will see why that was not far from the truth.

Before we get into the world of computers and software, we need to learn a few things about what a computer contains.

Computers have some important hardware devices in them:

• The Central Processing Unit (CPU)
• Random Access Memory (RAM)
• Storage devices (like hard-disks or solid state drives)
• Network ports and adapters (this is what helps us to connect to the Internet)
• Input/Output devices (like keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc)

When using a computer we may not realize how we use these hardware devices. We run applications that help us browse the Internet, watch movies, play games etc. These applications are installed in an Operating System like Windows or Mac or Linux.

These applications along with the Operating System then make use of the underlying hardware devices like the CPU, RAM etc to provide us with the required functionality.

It is interesting that anything and everything that a computer helps us achieve is done with just 2 digits, 0 and 1. Whether it is watching a movie, or playing a game or browsing the Internet, there are only 2 digits that a computer is processing - 0 and 1. Computers take a stream of 0s and 1s(a really large one at that!), process them to create another stream of 0s and 1s and then send the output to other devices, which again understand only 2 things (you guessed it), 0s and 1s.

Before we understand how computers achieve all the wonderful feats, we have to learn a bit about these 2 interesting digits (also called bits).