Inside Computers

Today, most people don't need to know how a computer works.  Most people can simply turn on a computer or a mobile phone and point at some little graphical image on the display, click another button, and the computer does something.  An example would be for it to get weather information from the net and display it.  This is all the average person needs to know about using a computer (or any device that's computer based).

But, since you are going to learn how to write computer programs, you need to know a little bit about how a computer works.  Your job will be to instruct the computer to do things.  These lists of instructions that you will write are computer programs, and the stuff that these instructions manipulate are different types of objects.

Basically, computers perform operations on objects.  A microprocessor, which is the heart of a computer, is really primitive but very fast.  It takes groups of binary numbers representing parts of objects and moves them around, adds pairs together, subtracts one from another, compares a pair, etc... - that sort of stuff.