Wet Pluto

Let us have a look at the parts of a computer and their duty. These include, but are not limited to the monitor (output), printer (output), processor (work), keyboard (input), mouse (input), modem (input and output), memory (RAM) (short term storage), floppy disks (long term storage) and hard disks (long term storage). Most home computers have speakers; those in computer labs or offices may not have speakers.

The floppy drive is always known as “Drive A”: It holds 1.5 megabytes of data, which means about 1,500,000 characters or letters. As pictures take up a large amount of space, only a small number of them can be fitted on a floppy disk. Because most programs are large, they would require 10 or 20 or more floppy disks to hold each program. Because of this, most programs today come on CD-ROM.

Measured in gigabytes, the hard drive is so called because the disks are made of aluminum or glass. The storage capacity of each disk can store much more than a floppy or CD-ROM. The circuit board to which everything inside the computer is connected is called the ‘motherboard’. It has sockets for the brain of the computer called the Central Processing Unit, RAM, ROM and CMOS and also for add-on cards to control video, audio, the printer and anything else that might be connected to the computer. A modem may also be found inside on an add-on card.

RAM or ‘Random Access Memory’ stores everything until you save your work to a disk. If the power is off, everything in RAM is wiped out. ROM or ‘Read Only Memory’ cannot be changed, so is not affected by loss of power.

The video card controls what you watch on the monitor, while the sound card controls the sound. Through a modem, your computer can be connected to another computer using a normal telephone line. Modems can send data at up to 56 thousand bits per second.