How Computers Work: What Makes a Computer, a Computer? — Transcript

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1. 0:02[Music] [Title: HOW COMPUTERS WORK:  WHAT MAKES A COMPUTER, A COMPUTER?]
2. 0:05May-Li: My name is May-Li Khoe and  I’m a designer and an inventor. So,
3. 0:10some of the things I’ve designed have been at  Apple, and now I design products for kids to use
4. 0:15so that they can have an easier time in school.  My other jobs include DJing and dancing. [Music]
5. 0:25Computers are everywhere! They’re in  people’s pockets; they’re in people’s cars;
6. 0:31people have them on their wrists; they  might be in your backpack right now.
7. 0:36But what makes a computer a computer? Nat: What does make a
8. 0:39computer a computer anyway? May-Li: And how does it even work? [Music]
9. 0:45Nat: Hi, I’m Nat. I was one of the original  designers of the Xbox. I’ve been working with
10. 0:51computers since I was maybe seven years old, and  now I work on virtual reality. [Music, laughing]
11. 1:07As humans, we’ve always built tools to help  us solve problems: tools like a wheelbarrow,
12. 1:12a hammer, or a printing press, or a tractor  trailer. All of these inventions helped us with
13. 1:18manual work. Over time, people began to wonder  if a machine could be designed and built to help
14. 1:23us with the thinking work we do, like solving  equations or tracking the stars in the sky.
15. 1:29Rather than moving or manipulating physical things  like dirt and stone, these machines would need to
16. 1:35be designed to manipulate information. [Music] May-Li: As the pioneers of computer science
17. 1:41explored how to design a thinking machine,  they realized that it had to perform four
18. 1:45different tasks. It would need to take input,  store information, process it, and then
19. 1:54output the results. Now this might sound simple,  but these four things are common to all computers.
20. 2:02That’s what makes a computer a computer. Nat:
21. 2:07The earliest computers were made out of wood  and metal with mechanical levers and gears.
22. 2:13By the twentieth century, though, computers  started using electrical components.
23. 2:17These early computers were really large and really  slow; a computer the size of a room might take
24. 2:23hours just to do a basic math problem. [Music] Old timey announcer:
25. 2:27These machines are things  of gleaming, varied metal
26. 2:30and numerous flashing lights. May-Li: Computers started out
27. 2:34as basic calculators, which was  already really awesome at the time,
28. 2:38and they were only manipulating numbers back then.  But now we can use them to talk to each other; we
29. 2:43can use them to play games, control robots, and do  any crazy thing that you could probably imagine.
30. 2:49Nat: Modern computers look nothing like  those clunky old machines, but they still
31. 2:54do these same four things. [Music] [Title: INPUT] May-Li:
32. 3:02First, we’re going to talk about input. This is my  favorite because what input is, is the stuff that
33. 3:08the world does—or that you do—that makes the  computer do stuff. You can tell a computer what to
34. 3:13do with a keyboard; you can tell them what to do  with a mouse, the microphone, the camera. And now,
35. 3:18if you’re wearing a computer on your wrist, it  might listen to your heartbeat. Or, in your car,
36. 3:23it might be listening to what the car is doing.  And a touch screen can actually sense your finger,
37. 3:28and it takes that as input on what it’s doing. [Music] [Title: STORAGE & PROCESSING] Nat:
38. 3:36All these different inputs give a computer  information, which is then stored in memory.
39. 3:42A computer’s processor takes  information from memory;
40. 3:45it manipulates it or changes it using an  algorithm, which is just a series of commands;
41. 3:49and then it sends the processed information back  to be stored in memory again. This continues until
42. 3:55the processed information is ready to be output. [Music] [Title: OUTPUT] Nat:
43. 4:03How a computer outputs information depends  on what the computer is designed to do.
44. 4:07A computer display can show text, photos, videos,  or interactive games—even virtual reality! The
45. 4:13output of a computer may even include signals  to control a robot. And, when computers connect
46. 4:18over the internet, the output from one computer  becomes the input to another, and vice versa.
47. 4:23May-Li: The computers we use today look really  different from the earliest thinking machines,
48. 4:30and who knows what the computers of tomorrow  will be like? My hope is that you get to help
49. 4:34decide what you want the computers of tomorrow to  look like. But across all computers, regardless
50. 4:39of the different types of technology they use,  they’re always doing the same four things. They
51. 4:44take in information, they store it as data, they  process it, and then they output the results.
52. 5:08[Music]