[Music] [Title: HOW COMPUTERS WORK:
WHAT MAKES A COMPUTER, A COMPUTER?]
May-Li: My name is May-Li Khoe 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. [Music] Computers are everywhere! They’re in
people’s pockets; they’re in people’s cars; people have them on their wrists; they
might be in your backpack right now. But what makes a computer a computer?
Nat: What does make a computer a computer anyway?
May-Li: And how does it even work? [Music]
Nat: 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. [Music, laughing] 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. [Music]
May-Li: 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.
Nat: The earliest computers were made out of wood
and metal with mechanical levers and gears. By the twentieth 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.
[Music] Old timey announcer: These machines are things
of gleaming, varied metal and numerous flashing lights.
May-Li: 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.
Nat: Modern computers look nothing like
those clunky old machines, but they still do these same four things.
[Music] [Title: INPUT] May-Li: 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 a computer what to do with a keyboard; you can tell them what to do
with a 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 touch screen can actually sense your finger, and it takes that as input on what it’s doing.
[Music] [Title: STORAGE & PROCESSING] Nat: 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.
[Music] [Title: OUTPUT] Nat: 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.
May-Li: 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 doing the same four things. They take in information, they store it as data, they
process it, and then they output the results. [Music]
