Computer Hardware Essay

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Recommended: Chapter 2 Intro to computers hardware

Introduction
Hardware can be daunting. The following is a brief look at why every computer science major should be knowledgeable in the acronyms that abound within the computer industry. Overwhelming Factors
Budding computer science majors can be thankful to Ken Thompson’s desire to travel space. It was this desire that maintained a failed attempt of an operating system by a joint venture of General Electric, Bell Labs, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The operating system was named Multics and was abandoned in the late sixties, yet Ken Thompson had programmed a game he named Space Travel for Multics and it still needed an operating system on which to run. As they did not have the resources they had to run Multics at the house, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked together to produce what we know today as UNIX (Ritchie, 1984), yet UNIX now needed a platform upon which to run and yet again, another savior to computer science that we can be thankful for today, IBM mass-produced personal computers for use in the common household. Yet, thankfully, IBM failed at dominating the personal computer market and clones became yet another savior.
Personal computers and their clones are comprised of standard, …show more content…

Memory acts as temporary storage, the permanent storage is the HDD itself. Files are read from sectors on the HDD according to their location kept in the File Allocation Table (FAT), loaded into RAM, manipulated by the user via the keyboard and the mouse and as the user saves the file, it is written to its permanent storage, the HDD. So, having an HDD that spins at 7200 RPM and has a 16MB cache becomes a valuable

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