How the PC Works

You’ve undoubtedly seen a PC in action: a nice, glossy monitor displaying a picture that changes according to the actions of the person sitting in front of it, typing away on a keyboard and clicking on a mouse. Sound pours out of tiny speakers that flank the screen, and a box whirs happily beneath the table. The PC is a computer: a machine that enables you to do work, produce documents, play games, balance your checkbook, and look up the latest sports scores on the Internet.

Although the computer is certainly a machine, it’s also programming: the commands that tell the computer what to do to get work done. These commands are just ones and zeros that the computer’s hardware understands, enabling it to do amazing actions, such as perform powerful mathematic functions, move data (also ones and zeros), realize the mouse has moved, and put pretty icons on the screen. So a computer is a complex interaction between hardware and computer programming, created by your fellow humans.