Hardware Components

The terms "input" and "output" say if data flow into or out of the systems unit. The picture shows the major hardware components of a computer system. The arrows show the direction of data flow.

The bus is a group of wires on the main circuit board of the computer. It is a pathway for data flowing between components. Most devices are connected to the bus through a controller which coordinates the activities of the device and the bus.

The processor is an electronic device about a one inch square, covered in plastic. Inside the square is an even smaller square of silicon containing millions of tiny electrical parts. A processor may contain 100 million transistors. The processor is the "brain" of the computer system. It does the fundamental computing within the system, and directly or indirectly controls all the other components.

The processor is sometimes called the Central Processing Unit or CPU. A particular computer will have a particular type of processor, such as a Pentium or a SPARC chip. (processors are often called "chips.")

Click Here to see the computer system these notes were prepared on. (It probably looks much like what you are yourself using.) You might notice that it is 5 years old. It works fine for running Java programs.