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my name is mainly ku and I'm a designer
and an inventor so some of the things
I've designed have been at Apple and now
I design products for kids to use so
that they can have an easier time in
school my other jobs include DJing and
dancing
computers are everywhere they're in
people's pockets they're in people's
cars will have them on their wrists they
might be in your backpack right now but
what makes a computer a computer what
does make a computer a computer anyway
and how does it even work
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hi I'm NAT I was one of the original
designers of the Xbox I've been working
with computers since I was maybe seven
years old and now I work on virtual
reality
as humans we've always built tools to
help us solve problems tools like a
wheelbarrow a hammer or a printing press
or a tractor trailer all of these
inventions helped us with manual work
over time people began to wonder if a
machine could be designed and built to
help us with the thinking work we do
like solving equations or tracking the
stars in the sky rather than moving or
manipulating physical things like dirt
and stone these machines would need to
be designed to manipulate information as
the pioneers of computer science
explored how to design a thinking
machine they realized that it had to
perform four different tasks it would
need to take input store information
process it and then output the results
now this might sound simple but these
four things are common to all computers
that's what makes a computer a computer
the earliest computers were made out of
wood and metal with mechanical levers
and gears by the 20th century though
computers started using electrical
components these early computers were
really large and really slow a computer
the size of a room might take hours just
to do a basic math problem these
machines are things of gleaming very
colored metal and numerous flashing
lights computers started out as basic
calculators which was already really
awesome at the time and they were only
manipulating numbers back then but now
we can use them to talk to each other we
can use them to play games control
robots and do any crazy thing that you
could probably imagine modern computers
look nothing like those clunky old
machines but they still do these same
four things
first we're going to talk about input
this is my favorite because what input
is is the stuff that the world does or
that you do that makes the computer do
stuff you can tell computers what to do
with the keyboard you can tell them what
to do with the mouse the microphone the
camera and now if you're wearing a
computer on your wrist it might listen
to your heartbeat or in your car it
might be listening to what the car is
doing and a touchscreen can actually
sense your finger and it takes that as
input on what it's doing all these
different inputs give a computer
information which is then stored in
memory a computer's processor takes
information from memory it manipulates
it or changes it using an algorithm
which is just a series of commands and
then it sends the processed information
back to be stored in memory again this
continues until the processed
information is ready to be output
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how a computer outputs information
depends on what the computer is designed
to do a computer display can show text
photos videos or interactive games even
virtual reality the output of a computer
may even include signals to control a
robot and when computers connect over
the Internet the output from one
computer becomes the input to another
and vice versa the computers we use
today look really different from the
earliest thinking machines and who knows
what the computers of tomorrow will be
like my hope is that you get to help
decide what you want the computers of
tomorrow to look like but across all
computers regardless of the different
types of technology they use they're
always those doing the same for things
they take in information they store it
as data they process it and then they
output the results
you
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you