| OVERVIEW |
| “This unit has a Pentium 4, 2.3 gigaHertz processor, a 60 gig harddrive and 512Megabytes of memory. With a four channel sound card with 6-in-1 speakers and high speed DVD this is the ultimate machine. It also has a 130megaHertz front side bus and 6 USB ports.” Warning! You are now entering, The Computer Zone! You have just stepped into a computer store and are looking for something to get for your kids to use for their homework. You asked for a computer and the salesman has just shown you that it takes a degree in rocket science to even buy one! How does anyone understand this stuff? That is the purpose of this column. The first step is to understand what the terms mean. We are going to make one assumption only and that is that our discussion is about an IBM or Intel type of computer as opposed to an Apple or Macintosh system. So with that in mind, lets look at a little history and some basic terminology. There are two general classes of computers, business and personal. Businesses use large computers called mainframes. The personal computer is designed for use in the home. The processor is the heart of the computer. This is where all the operating instructions are located. Another term commonly used is the brain of the computer. When first developed there were families of processors defined by their integrated chip (hereafter referred to as chip), number. Thus there were the 40888, 40286, then 40386, 40486. These came to be called 286’s, 386, then 486. Many companies were making versions of these. Intel and AMD were two of the frontrunners. Because of this, the next version was not called the 586, but instead was named Pentium. Each succession from 286 to 386, etc was called a generation. A Pentium 4 is a fourth generation of 586. The difference is that each succeeding generation had more instructions built in. Hertz is a measurement of speed. It describes how many instructions can be processed. Giga is a prefix for billion. In other words a 1 gigaHertz processor can process one billion instructions per second. Mega is the prefix for million. A byte is a unit of memory. It takes one byte to hold one alphanumeric character. Thus, a 1 megabyte storage unit can hold one million characters. This is the beginning of a series of columns explaining the complicated world of computers in simple, easy to understand, term. Knowledge is power and the knowledge of what a computer is and what the terms mean gives a person the power to understand these high tech salespeople. My aim is to answer your questions in non technical terms. |