SPEAKER: Computers are everywhere.
You come into contact with them at home, work, the airport,
the grocery store.
You're using some type of computer to take this course.
You know what?
There's probably one in your pocket right now.
While computers are complex and can seem daunting to learn,
they ultimately just calculate, process, and store data.
In this lesson, we're going to take a peek
at what's inside of a computer.
We'll spend the next few lessons explaining how
each of these components work.
But for now, let's check out a typical desktop setup.
Desktops are just computers that can fit on or under our desks.
So here we have a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse,
and a desktop.
Sometimes we might even add a webcam, speakers, or a printer
setup.
We'll call these physical components hardware.
Let's take a look at the back of the computer.
You can see common connectors here,
the power outlet here, and the common ports here.
Ports are connection points that we can connect devices
to that extend the functionality of our computer.
We'll go into detail about the ports
you see here in a later lesson, but here's a quick rundown.
We have a port here to connect to a monitor
and a few ports here to plug your keyboard and mouse.
There's another important one here for our network
connection.
With just these ports, we're able to have
the basic functionality to browse the web and much more.
Things look pretty similar on a laptop.
Here are some of the same ports, a built-in monitor,
and a keyboard.
There are also physical components
inside the laptop case that are hidden for portability.
Once you figure out how one computer works,
you can figure out how any other computer works.
OK, this is my favorite part.
Let's open up this desktop and take a deeper look.
Let me first clean up my desk.
Get ready for it.
Whoa.
It looks pretty complicated, but that's OK.
We'll take you through it.
Let's start with a quick tour.
Then we'll dive deeper into each of these parts
in the next lesson.
Right here, this component is the CPU, or Central Processing
Unit, which is covered by this heatsink.
You can think of the CPU as the brain of our computer.
The CPU does all the calculations and data
processing.
It communicates pretty heavily with this component right here,
RAM, or Random Access Memory.
RAM is our computer's short-term memory.
We use this component when we want to store data temporarily.
Let's say you're typing something
into a chat or a piece of text in a word processor.
This information is stored in the RAM.
Don't worry.
We'll cram in more details on RAM in a later lesson.
When we want to store anything in long-term memory,
we use this component here, the hard drive.
The hard drive holds all our data,
which can include music, pictures, applications.
Let me show you something else interesting.
Have you noticed this large slab here?
This is our motherboard.
It holds everything in place and lets our components
communicate with each other.
It's the foundation of our computer.
You can think of the motherboard as the body or circulatory
system of the computer that connects
all the pieces together.
The last component we'll talk about
is our power supply, which converts electricity
from our wall outlet onto a format
that our computer can use.
You know what's interesting?
All these components make up most computers, even
a mobile phone.
While it might look very different from your laptop,
a mobile phone just uses a smaller version of the hardware
that we saw in the desktop and laptop today.