The Permiation of Everyday Computing

Everyday Computing

Computers are all around us, whether it’s in your phone or in the cash register at your local store, to the Google mainframe handling millions of search queries. A general answer to “What is a computer?” would be that screen or box on a desk at school or home. These are merely personal computers; there are many other types of computers, but they all have relatively the same functionality. Computers are a large part of everyday life, most going unseen and unknown.

Computers range in many shapes and sizes, but they all have the same basic principle. A computer is an electronic device, operating under the control of instructions stored in its own memory, that can accept data (Input), process the data according to specified rules (Process), produce results (Output), and store the results (Storage) for future use. Computers perform four basic operations – input, process, output, and storage. These operations comprise the information processing cycle. Collectively, these operations process data into information and store it for future use (Shelly and Vermaat). As stated by Shelly and Vermaat, a computer goes through four basic steps. No matter what the task is or how it is executed, a computer will always go through these steps.

In order for a computer to do an action it goes through a list of instructions called a program, these instructions are written by people called programmers. Before processing for a specific activity begins, the program corresponding to that activity is stored in the computer. Once the program is stored, the computer can begin to execute the program’s first instruction. The computer executes one program instruction after another until the activity is complete (Shelly and Vermaat). Programs are...

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... it. Such precision could not be possible with human hands.

Figure 2: Blue Gene Supercomputer (Gene)

Larger computers, such as mainframes and supercomputers, can take up entire rooms and compute faster and more powerfully than smaller computers. Computers range in a wide variety of shapes and sizes; they all follow the same four basic steps, but have different uses.

Works Cited

Gene, Blue. Flickr. n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. .

Shelly, Gary B. and Misty E. Vermaat. Microsoft Office 2012 Introductory. Boston: Course Technology, Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.

Wikipedia. Embbeded Systems. n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. .

—. Overo with coin. n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. .

Wikipediea. Robotic Surgery. n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.