I attended my high school Homecoming football game yesterday. There was no particular reason for me to go, other than that my mother called and invited me, and I had no other plans for the day. The last time I had been to a football game at my old high school was probably about fifteen […]
In case you hadn’t noticed, the FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament is in full swing in China. We all know that football is the most popular sport in the world. That’s soccer to those of us in the USA, and since this article is about the USA, I will call it soccer. Last month I […]
A web cookie is a short segment of data sent from a website to your browser when you visit a webpage. The browser then sends the cookie back to the website at a later time in order to verify that you have been there previously. The cookie was originally developed in the 1990s as a […]
A port on a computer is a socket for a specific type of plug, used to connect components or peripheral devices. On early models of computers, each peripheral device had its own port: an AT keyboard port, a serial port for a mouse or modem, a parallel port for a printer, a video port for […]
The hard disk drive (abbreviated HDD), more commonly called the hard disk or hard drive, is the device that stores the operating system, your software, and your data files. It is a magnetic medium, as opposed to the optical media of CDs and DVDs. The hard disk is the most complicated mechanical device in the […]
Random access memory, abbreviated and pronounced RAM, is the component of a computer that holds whatever the computer is thinking about right now. It is sometimes referred to simply as memory, or volatile memory, because it is lost when the computer is turned off. In humans, RAM is like short-term memory. For example, someone tells […]
The central processing unit, almost always abbreviated and pronounced CPU, is the brains of the computer. It is a small chip, about the size of a matchbook, black in color, attached flat on the motherboard. It does all of the mind-numbing computations, and it controls the other components. It is the CPU that distinguishes the […]
The motherboard is the printed circuit board that serves as the central highway that connects all of the other internal components of the computer. On a desktop computer it is about the size of a magazine and usually green or yellow in color. While the CPU is considered to be the brains of the computer, […]
Hardware is the term used to describe the individual components that make up a computer, computer system, or computer network. It refers to the physical pieces of equipment, in contrast to software, which is the sets of instructions that run a computer. In general, a desktop computer system consists of the hardware in the case […]
In general terms, digital means that information is contained in discrete elements, with nothing in between. For example, a digital clock with an Hour:Minute display shows you the time as discrete elements of minutes. By glancing at the clock once, you cannot tell how close you are to the next minute. There is no in-between. […]