How do computers work?

Ah computers, the bane of my existence. Computers are like the annoying younger sibling at a family get-together. They make your life harder, but you can’t quite do without them. Have you ever wondered how they work? Well, get ready for a wild ride! A computer is essentially a machine that takes a set of instructions, known as a program, and turns it into an output. At its heart, a computer is made up of two components: hardware and software. Hardware refers to the physical pieces of a computer, such as the motherboard, processor, memory, and storage. Software is the instructions that tell the hardware what to do. To understand how this all works, let’s take a look at a common example: a web browser. The hardware is the physical computer itself. The software is the web browser, which is a program that takes information from a website and displays it on the screen. The way the computer works is pretty simple. It takes the instructions from the software and interprets them. It then sends signals to the hardware to tell it what to do. The hardware then processes those signals and produces the output. Fun Fact: The first computer virus was created in 1982 by a computer programmer named Rich Skrenta. It was called the Elk Cloner virus and was spread through floppy disks! So there you have it! Computers are essentially a machine that takes instructions and generates an output. Pretty simple, right?