This series of posts give information on many misconceptions and commonly used terms by tech savy folk. Next time you engage in such a conversation, you'll understand a little bit more of what they say as you continue reading this series of Common terms in Computer Science. These are 10 terms you can now know:
1. Hardware and Software:
Anyone who can read a blog post online probably knows what hardware and software are, but it is worth mentioning anyways. In an electronic machine, the actual physical components that do the work are called Hardware and the instruction set on which they run is called software. It is easy to think that whatever we can touch and feel is hardware and what we cannot touch and feel is Software.
2. Analog and Digital:
These are technically two terms, but they go hand-in-hand because they are the opposite of each other. Analog stands for processes that don't get processed digitally and are completely hardware driven. These are usually old-school devices such as tape recorders and cassetes.
Digital refers to processes that involve processing of data on an instruction set to take input and give output. Though this complicates simple tasks, it simplifies complicated tasks that most electronic machines face today.
3. Bit, Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte etc.:
These are units used in computer science. Since computers read binary data, one binary charachter (0 or 1) is called a bit. 8 bits is one byte, 1024 bits is a Kilobyte, 1024 kiobytes is a megabyte etc. Here is a conversion chart:
1 byte(B) = 8 bits
1 kilobyte (KB) = 1024 bytes
1 megabyte (MB) = 1024 kilobytes
1 gigabyte (GB) = 1024 megabytes
1 terabyte (TB) = 1024 gigabytes
1 petabyte (PB) = 1024 terabytes
1 exabyte (EB) = 1024 petabytes
1 zettabyte (ZB) = 1024 exabytes
1 yottabyte (YB) = 1024 zettabytes
To get an idea of how small or big these sizes are, a typical 5 minute mp3 song is about 3 megabytes.
Bonus: When you are buying a storage device, the suffix 'bytes' corresponds to 1 KB = 1000B instead of 1024, and this pattern continues. For values corresponding to 1024, look for a suffix 'bibytes'. Ex: kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes and so on.
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| Computer - An Illustration |
4. CPU:
A CPU is the Central Processing Unit of a computer that executes all the instructions required to be performed, without graphical interfaces. It executes tasks based on it's specific instruction set, which can vary between CPUs. The CPU honestly deserves an entire post to be explained completely. We will learn more about CPUs in a future post. If that post is published, you can click here to view it.
5. Network:
A network, in simple terms, is just a conection between different computers. There are different types of networks, which we will get to later in a different post. If that post is published, you will be able to click here for the link to that post.
That's it for today's post. I'll come back next week for the full details about CPUs such as Cores, Transistors and Architechture. Untill then, stay tuned. Thanks for Reading.
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