LIS508 lecture 3: computer & input devices

Thomas Krichel 2002-10-06

Admin news
Grades for the quizzes will be made available at http://wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel/lis508w0 3a/grades/secret.html where secret is your word, transliterated into all lowercase, example
seCret secret SecrEt secret

Literature
Peter Norton New inside the PC chapter 1 and 5 Ruth Maran and Paul Whitehead Teach yourself computers visually, chapter 1 and 3 Hutchinson and Sawyer chapter 2 White, part 5

Hardware and Software

Hardware is anything in the computer you can touch. Software are the instructions that make the computer do things. In early days, software was closely tied to hardware. It could only run on machines of a specific hardware and was useless on other machines.

structure
general things about computers looking at computer hardware bus input devices
keyboard mouse other

Computers
An old distinction is the following
A Mainframe is a computer that are used by many people in an organization. They access it through terminals. A personal computer is a machine that is used by only one person at a time. In olden days it could only do one thing at a time.

A PC is a special type of personal computer.

What is a PC
The PC was first brought out by IBM in 1981
IBM published the design. Processor chips supplied by Intel. Software to run it was bought from Microsoft Microsoft had the right to have other companies use the operating system.

A PC is any computer that basically follows this tradition.

Intel processor Microsoft software

Basic parts of a PC
Display Input
Keyboard Mouse etc

do not open no need to open

System Unit
Logic system Display system Storage system Input output system Communication system

may be opened

Opening the system unit

Voltages used in the PC are 3 to 12 V Be aware of static electricity, touch first unpainted part of case first Keep power cable plugged in a grounded socket Never open sealed part of the power supply

Logic system I
Motherboard
green plastic sheet with traces and slots usually complying to a standard called plug and play

Jumpers can set key features

Jumper wires stick out of the motherboard Can be shortened with jumpers Do not change unless you have to

The logic system II

CMOS or flash memory
Powered by battery holds the Basic Input Output System (BIOS)

Central Processing Unit (CPU), recognizable through its fan Cache memory for CPU Main memory socket The Bus (see later)

BIOS
Is the software that makes the components of the PC work together When the computer boots it tells you how to enter setup There you can make changes to the BIOS setting The way that you do this is not standardized
It usually is a simple menu. Be careful

Usual things to set in the BIOS

Set the hardware clock Set processor speed setting Tell the machine what disks you have Power management options Automatic wake up Boot sequence setting

The Bus
Set of connections between devices in the system unit. Not very precisely defined Types of bus
Industry Standard Architecture ISA bus (16 bit), old Peripheral Component Interconnect PCI bus (32 bit) Accelerated graphics port (AGP) bus, only for graphics

The CPU
Quality of CPU is a major component of the speed of the machine Speed of the CPU is measured in Hertz, as the number of instructions per second. Intel are the main manufacturer
Pentium Celeron Processor

but other manufacturers may be offering better quality/price.

The components on the bus

The display system
Video card

Storage system
Hard disk Floppy disk CD-rom CD-R CD-RW

Other components on the bus

Modems, allow communication over a phone line
Internal modems with own serial device It squeaks

Network interfaces
network cards

Input/Output components
Parallel port
Parallel because it can move a whole byte at a time Mainly used for connection to a printer Nowadays it can handle bidirectional traffic

Serial port
One bit at a time Slow -- Uses thin cable -- inexpensive

Universal serial bus (USB) replaces those

Universal Serial Bus (USB)

It is a new, rectangular port device 4 wires
2 for power 2 for communication

USB has a hub/slave technology

One USB line can connect to a hub The hub has several outgoing lines, that connect to other devices

This is achieved by a complex set of software

Keys on a keyboard
Typewriter keys Function keys Arrow keys Editing keys Numeric keypad Alt and Control keys Escape, windows key Obsolete keys

Scholes layout
Initial layout be Christopher Scholes around 1860. Early typewriters jammed when adjacent keys were typed to fast. Scholes design resulted from trying to avoid this occurrence. This resulted in the famous qwerty keyboard.

Dvorak keyboard
An efficient keyboard for the English language, patented by August Dvorak, cousin of the composer. Result of efforts to study typewriting behavior. Studies in the US Navy suggest that the payback period would be 10 days from learning Dvorak. From my own experience, doubtful.

The mouse
There are two-button and three button mice. Since MS uses two buttons, three button mice are a dying species. The third (middle) button can be emulated on two-button mice by pressing the left and the right button at the same time. Use of the mouse is best avoided!

The two buttons

Primary button -- usually left Secondary button usually right Actions in Microsoft windows
Left click Right click Left double click (time adjustable) Left drag and drop Right drag and drop

Health risks
Keyboard and mouse usage can cause serious injury. From my experience, they are often not be the lone cause. Others are
Stress Bad posture

other devices
Replacements for a mouse are
trackballs touchpads joysticks

Pen-based devices
vary with respect to text recognition

text and code scanners

bar-code readers magnetic ink character recognition such as on bank checks. optical mark recognition optical character recognition
more general form of reading characters out of handwriting or print expensive and error-prone

image scanners
most widely used digitization device you can try to run OCR once you have the image resolution measured in dots per inch. dpi
more dpi: crisper image fewer dpi: smaller file

audio input
Microphone with speech recognition software
This used to be mainly for those who can not type But the quality has improved, and maybe we will use it for more general input.

Other analog to digital sound converters

sound cards MIDI board

Other devices
sensors biometric devices

http://openlib.org/home/krichel
Thank you for your attention!